Isn’t it interesting how we can intellectually understand a piece of wisdom but not practice it in our daily lives?
I’d like to tell you about a hard-won truth I recently internalized after many years.
I’ll sum it up in a sentence and then tell you more about my experience:
The willingness to face uncomfortable emotions is the path to inner peace.
Although I’ve known this to be true conceptually, I mistakenly thought I could get away with not properly processing my emotions. Then, about three months into the pandemic, it finally caught up with me.
I found myself feeling sustained and, at times, overwhelming negative emotion. I became depressed for days on end. When I wasn’t depressed, I was more anxious than normal. When I wasn’t anxious, I was hyper annoyed. And mad. So mad. At one point, during an argument with my wife, I started convulsing on the floor with rage. It was terrifying. For both of us.
Then, almost overnight something seemed to click for me. While doing research for my book, there were a series of moments where things started to become very clear. Suddenly, I understood the point of personal development. I grasped the essence of what many spiritual teachings were pointing to.
I also realized why I had been suffering. Most importantly, I understood this not merely intellectually but viscerally.
It will take me an entire book to unpack the realizations and lessons that unfolded for me but I’ll focus on one aspect here.
For most of my life, when I experienced an emotion I labeled “bad,” I believed on some level that I shouldn’t be having it. Sometimes I would get upset I was feeling the emotion but often I would simply bypass it by turning my attention to something else.
As it turns out, this is a terrible strategy for long-term well-being. The reason is fairly simple:
Life wants to be experienced in its entirety.
Life is not just one thing. The suppleness of language makes it seem as though experiences and concepts can be neatly categorized but they cannot. For example, when we utter the word, “life” we might think the word implies an existence characterized by only positive experiences.
In reality, life is many things. It’s everything, actually. The good, the bad and the ugly.
“When we cut ourselves off from a particular experience we label “negative” or “bad,” it doesn’t go away. It just goes underground where it festers in darkness, waiting to return with a vengeance and get the attention it so desperately craves.”
When we cut ourselves off from a particular experience we label “negative” or “bad,” it doesn’t go away. It just goes underground where it festers in darkness, waiting to return with a vengeance and get the attention it so desperately craves.
I know now that the overwhelming negative emotions I was experiencing were an accumulation of past pain that I hadn’t properly processed. I needed to feel those emotions in one way or another. Apparently, my psyche saw quarantine as an opportunity to catch up on experiencing all those unfelt feelings.
It’s tempting to blame my unraveling on the stress of the pandemic or the civil unrest or any other number of unpleasant events that are happening in the world. But if those had any influence on me at all, they were just the straw that broke the camel’s back. I had been weakening my ability to deal with unpleasant emotions for years by not facing them head on.
Yes, life is full of beautiful and positive experiences, there’s no question about that. But it’s also full of unpleasant ones. It’s full of injustice and unfairness and tragedy. We can’t ignore that. This isn’t a pessimistic view, it’s a liberating one. Because when we properly set our expectations about life, we don’t have to live in fear that we might, one day, encounter adversity. We know we will. And when we do, we can be prepared.
How do we prepare? By practicing exposing ourselves to discomfort. Just as strength training increases the amount of weight our muscles can lift, facing our unpleasant emotions increases the degree of adversity we can tolerate.
In short, voluntarily exposing ourselves to discomfort makes us more adaptable to a wider range of circumstances.
In psychology, this is called flexibility or resilience. In personal development, it’s called emotional fitness. In Buddhism, it’s called acceptance. Whatever you call it, it is one of the most important skills you will ever learn. Period.
I feel as though I’m seeing things more clearly now than ever. I feel balanced and at peace. A happy byproduct of my “awakening” is that I finally feel as though my book is coming together in an authentic and meaningful way. I suppose I needed to find my own way out of the darkness so I could help light the way for others.
Anyway, just wanted to share my experience with you. I hope you found it useful. I will elaborate on these ideas (and others) in upcoming posts — and, of course, in the book I’m writing.
Ruben Chavez is a writer and host of The Think Grow Podcast.