Insight about emotions

[fopylo]

So when I try practicing being more conscious of my feelings in my day to day I tend to realize that I'm way better at recognizing fear and "lower" feelings like sadness, anger, frustration. But then once I express it (say on a journal) then I get stuck, because what now? A new feeling is supposed to enter right? A higher one on the emotional scale I believe. Consciously or subconsciously I don't put my focus on higher feelings really, to be conscious of them. I believe most of it is because it was way more important for me to get out of the binds of fear and "negative" emotions, and so I'm only used to put my focus on it and so I don't have much experience outside of it. Also, a good piece of my identity is still defined by those emotions, and so letting go of these emotions and welcoming  the higher ones are a bit threatening, but I know they will be liberating.

The way I recognized it was because I'm doing this exercise Leo gave of mindfulness of thoughts and I've realized that most of the thoughts I wrote were from the lower emotions. I didn't consider the higher emotions like contentment, passion, boredom. Because honestly, the lower ones are easier. I think it also depends on your average state of being.

[Anahata]

I think you might have experienced emotional neglect or the other extreme -> enmeshment. 

[Anahata]

Your ego might express the frustration of feeling disempowered in this way as a warning bell to give you a wake-up call. It's like physical pain. Why would you feel pain if you were to break your arm for example? Because something is not right, you cannot live like that, your body is meant to be whole. Same thing with emotional pain. The psyche wants to feel whole again. It got fragmented because of trauma. I suggest you look into shadow work, enmeshment & emotional neglect materials if you consider any of these to be related. I recommend finding a professional for this work.

Edited May 28, 2021 by Anahata

[fopylo]

@Anahata I haven't gotten much love at my teenage years, or more accurately, I didn't accept it in my experience (but still it wasn't much). My mother tends to get angry easily and tries to dig deep and as if she is trying hard for me to face this pain of guilt and humiliation she's trying to open up to me, and I've always ran away from those feelings. Same with my father. He's trying to get to much into my life in subtle ways and I just want him to get the fuck out of my life and stop asking these indirect personal questions and start focusing on his own life instead of mine. So you can understand why a person like me would have trouble feeling emotions if he escaped from them for years.

I am doing my mindfulness practices and meditation. But I don't want to neglect Maslow's Hierarchy and to get super hyped about spirituality and neglect the basics. That's why sometimes I prefer not to go far with spirituality. I've seen Leo's video yesterday about Shamanic Breathing which did catch my attention, like really. He said that it's effects are very great and could serve as a practice before psychedelics. But I'm kinda scared doing it, because what if I lose myself and get very emotional and I'm around my parents. FYI I try to act as much stoic as I can around my parents. Not expressing emotions next to them. No way. Criticism from dad, ignorance from mom. I can't let those effects to pour in when I'm not that in control, as I might later deeply be hurt and regret it. It's supposed to bring up lots of scary shit which is terrifying me, but if it means setting me free then I'm more likely to do it sometime.

23 hours ago, Anahata said:

I recommend finding a professional for this work.

Also a problem. Can't let my parents know I do this. It has to be private somehow.
I've lately been taking a few Japanese lessons on Italki and I've planned well for a time in the week when no one is home (besides my brother who's always in the basement), but I was still very nervous that someone would hear me from outside. My father surprisingly was unexpectedly home and I was nervous as hell. My brother or father might have heard me and it just pains me and I've took a break from it

[mandyjw]

It sounds like your family and your caring what people think is a major blockage. Consider that you in your thoughts are judging yourself pre-emptively before they can, as a method of protection. In other words you hurt yourself before anyone else can as a method of protection. This makes no sense. You can stop doing this at any point one you realize that you are the one doing it. Even when someone does react or says something harsh to us, we are the ones who can choose to believe and take personally what they say or to see that it had more to do with them than us. We learn not to block our emotions and start to see that the pain comes from blocking them, that when there is no resistance, the pain is not there. The pain IS the resistance, the emotional self harm IS the method of defense. 

We learn patterns of interacting around others who perpetually stay on a low place on the emotional scale, and we mirror them. We believe that they will not like us or will reject us if we challenge their set point. At some point we get the idea that staying in a low spot is "safe". We find connection with others by complaining about things going wrong because they can relate, but this is not true connection and it's not really what we want. It's not really what they want either. 

You are living in disconnection from your family, scared to resolve this because you have a fear of disconnection. See how circular and self-created this is? It's possible that if you open up a shit storm ensues, but then the air is cleared and everything settled, eventually. It's possible that if you open up you realize that there was no real blockage there, it was only self imposed. 

[fopylo]

On 5/30/2021 at 3:48 PM, mandyjw said:

You are living in disconnection from your family, scared to resolve this because you have a fear of disconnection

Actually I'm living in my parents house, soon finishing high-school. I don't really fear being away from them. I really believe that cutting ties with them is the best solution for me. Maybe not that harshly but at least to stay far from them as I feel they are limiting my growth. (obviously it is me who is limiting my growth but they are a great handicap and with my current development level I need to change some externals to influence the external)