Strong Feelings

[Michael Gray]

Humpack Whale Breacing – by Brigitte Werner from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/photos/humpback-whale-natural-spectacle-436122/

 

My emotions have undergone a process of dilution similar to the hot water and milk I add to my cups of coffee, which let me drink them all day without getting caffeine-overload. Similarly, having less intense feelings helps me to feel more balanced; although I still sometimes fall into the sinkholes that surround certain images from the past.

Spiritual practices, which lessen the impact of desire, anger, and ignorance, probably provide a better solution to life’s distressing challenges than counting on my declining energy. But there seems to be a natural process in which time washes away intense emotional responses to events. This process is strengthened by the knowledge that regret serves no useful purpose; that if I hope to live the rest of my life at home with my interests and aspirations, I need to make peace with the past and not get caught up in currents trying to pull me out of my depth.

By telling myself that strong emotions damage my peace of mind, I may have been too hasty. Feelings are not just fuel for regret, disappointment, and heartbreak. Feelings are also the currents of caring that connect me to what matters in life. Without feeling, and its hand maidens hope and care, I wouldn’t appreciate being alive. I might come up with purposes and assign meanings, but they would feel like homework assigned by someone who doesn’t know me or even like me.

Perhaps before we can let strong feelings surface, we need to accept the lessons that life is trying to teach us. When we feel our confidence and happiness being eroded, we don’t have to try to escape those feelings right away. We can accept them as a call to awaken their hidden companions, love and appreciation. After all, we haven’t yet managed to terraform the landscape in which we live by ignoring how we feel from moment to moment.

Feelings aren’t always about us and our attempts to fit inside a world that we don’t fully understand. Feelings can be like whales surfacing from the depths of a vast ocean, reminding us that life is everywhere and always.

Those beings aren’t always whales from the deep. I remember a time when I was getting up at 4:00 am each morning and sitting on a screened porch in the chilly darkness. One morning well before dawn, two large dogs came into the yard and, running hither and yon, they checked out everything with an interest like what I was experiencing in the book that was getting me out of bed hours before I had to leave for work: “Time, Space, Knowledge” (by Tarthang Tulku). Those dogs didn’t see me watching them through the screen, so they wouldn’t have realized that for me they were emissaries from an unknown world, letting me know that there are other species with other senses and different kinds of minds who are every bit as at home in their experience as I could ever be in mine.

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