(no subject)
When uncomfortable memories or emotions arise in me during Yoga, meditation or in the daily course of life, I look at it as a sort of purging. The emotion is somewhere there down deep, some force brought it to the surface, and the only way to heal and come to terms with it is to acknowledge it's there, analyze it without judgment, realizing to dwell on these things is to live in the past. You have to just let it go. The here and now is really all we have, and if we spend time thinking about things and people that hurt us in the past, we're not really living. At times I have felt the energy of such emotions rise through my core and exit through the top of my head, and I feel the freedom of knowing I no longer have to feel the pain of that experience because I have made peace with it. Thursday during our Dharma talk Catherine was talking about how when you're thinking about a hurtful or traumatic experience in the past, your brain can't tell the difference between the real experience and the act of remembering that experience days, weeks, even years later. The same emotions and chemicals are released, and you're basically suffering all over again. We have control over this, and that control is called mindfulness. The goal of the practice, and the goal of each of us throughout the course of our lives, is to mitigate suffering. It takes training, practice, and the guidance of a good teacher, but it is possible and the only effective way I've found for myself to find some sort of balance and peace in my life. It's essentially the most important lesson I've gleaned from Catherine in my yoga practice, articulated more eloquently by turil in the LJ buddhists community:
Buddhists teach people to not push emotions away, but the let them arise, and acknowledge them as being messengers of information that you can accept as gifts, while realizing that you can choose to use the gift as is, change it into something else, or simply let it float back out of your life (where someone else who might appreciate it more can find it). Once you see that you might have a choice of what to do with the information you've been so kindly given by your emotions (ego) you can suddenly find yourself free and open to all of the gifts that the world gives you, no matter what form they come in, or who the messenger is that delivers your gift of information.
Buddhists teach people to not push emotions away, but the let them arise, and acknowledge them as being messengers of information that you can accept as gifts, while realizing that you can choose to use the gift as is, change it into something else, or simply let it float back out of your life (where someone else who might appreciate it more can find it). Once you see that you might have a choice of what to do with the information you've been so kindly given by your emotions (ego) you can suddenly find yourself free and open to all of the gifts that the world gives you, no matter what form they come in, or who the messenger is that delivers your gift of information.