Emotions and authenticity

Ten years ago I was wrestling with the pull to let go of my job and work as healer. For several months I’ lived with a nagging awareness that barista was my calling, but the job came with a steady paycheck. Letting go of that was scary thought. Then a book called Callings by Gregg Levoy dropped into my life.

    The book is a wonderful exploration of the search for authenticity in all aspects of life. After reading the book, I realized that the real question about whether or not to follow my gut and work as a healer had nothing to do with letting go of a steady income. It was a question of authenticity. How far was I willing to go to step further into who I truly am?

    There is a quote in book from F. Scott Fitzgerald that stuck with me:

            “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

     One of the things I find amazing about us human beings is our capacity for paradox. Even though we all have our own beliefs, we are capable of understanding opposing views. We can see multiple sides of an issue. We can even encompass opposing ideas of equal value. This allows us to be flexible and stretch beyond reducing our experience down to “right” and “wrong.”

     We have an equal capacity for emotional paradox; for feeling several apparently conflicting emotions at once. Yet when it comes to emotions, many of us are prone to selecting one feeling over the others rather than staying with the paradox.

     Authenticity is about being true to you and remaining loyal to internal rather than external values. So when we sort our emotions and pick one while denying the rest, we are moving away from authenticity.

     This emotional sorting process is largely unconscious. It’s also fueled by judgment. We are habituated to regard some emotions as “good” and others as “bad.” Some of this conditioning comes from socialization. We learn from our families and the society we live in which emotions are seen as acceptable and which are not. In fact, five of the infamous seven deadly sins (wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony) are emotions.

      We also carry personal judgments around feelings. Often these come from painful experiences that we associate with feeling a certain way. In an attempt to protect ourselves and avoid repeating the experience, we label the feeling that we believe triggered the experience as “bad.”

     Some of our personal judgments about feelings really aren’t personal. They’re distortions and beliefs we’ve internalized from an external source. The distortions often come from our tendency to compare our insides with someone else’s outsides, i.e. compare how we feel to how someone else looks.

     When we reject an emotion based on what someone says about it or a fear of how another person will judge us for feeling it, we are sacrificing our authenticity.

     Personal beliefs around certain emotions being “bad” essentially arise from our desire not to feel things that are uncomfortable. No one likes to feel jealous, vulnerable, lonely or ashamed. The desire not to feel difficult emotions, coupled with the mistaken belief that avoiding them is possible, can push us to label these feelings as “negative.” The numerous articles and books we’ve seen about how feeling happy is a choice only affirms our belief that we’d be better off not feeling certain things.

    Bottom line – emotion is part of the human experience. Repeatedly rejected an emotion only serves to disconnect us from our emotional body. If we’re disconnected enough, we may have little or no awareness of what we’re feeling. However, that doesn’t change what we’re really feeling.

    What happens to those rejected feelings? Whenever we disown about ourselves becomes part of our shadow. The energy we exert to push a feeling away actually feeds it. This sets up a vicious cycle. The judgments around the rejected emotion get stronger. The next time that feeling arises, it comes with more judgment. This leads us to put more effort into rejecting the emotion, which in turn reinforces the judgment, etc., etc.

    When we judge an emotion, what are we really judging? Feelings aren’t facts. We are not our emotions. At their simplest, feelings are information. Emotions are perhaps the most direct and raw information we get from ourselves. When we judge an emotion we’re effectively saying it’s only okay to listen to certain types of information from ourselves.

    Direct rejection of a feeling is the gross level of our emotional sorting process. The same thing occurs in much subtler way with mixed emotions. Human beings rarely feel only one thing at a time. Most of the time we experience mixed emotions. Even getting something we really want comes with a touch of sadness related to the change involved.

    Here again we carry a lot of baggage about what’s okay and not okay to feel. If something wonderful happens for a close friend when your life is not going so well, you’ll probably feel both happy for your friend and envious. The envy arises from you wishing something amazing would happen in your life too. Both are natural emotional responses.

    It’s socially acceptable to feel happy for your friend and probably not acceptable to feel envious. So in a fraction of a second, your emotional sorting process grabs “happy” and rejects “envy.” This may happen so quickly that the envy is pushed away before you even realize you’re feeling it.

    While it may not be the best idea to act on feeling envious, not allowing yourself to acknowledge it only reinforces your pre-existing judgments.

    A variant of this process occurs with mixed emotions that don’t involve another person. If something wonderful happens, your immediate emotional response may be to feel happy. After that initial wave of happiness recedes, you realize that in order to meet this wonderful thing you’ll have make some changes. Grief and change are pretty intertwined. So now there’s some grief mixed in with your happiness.

     But wait, something wonderful happened. You’re “supposed’ to feel happy. That judgment opens the door for your emotional sorting process to jump in and rescue you from this apparent conflict.

     In these situations I usually experience some disbelief at feeling two apparently opposite emotions at once. Some part of me wants to see those feelings as opposing forces that will cancel each other out if they both occur at the same time. This pushes me to turn feeling two disparate emotions into an either/or situation where I have to pick one or the other. I don’t. I can chose authenticity and go to “and.”