Letting Go of Emotional Control

¨Our being is a brilliant pattern of energies, a spectrum of possibilities. At every moment we have the capacity to experience the open dimension of what we are.¨

The teachings offered in this series, yoga for emotional healing are simple, yet deep and meaningful. By opening to our emotions we can free ourselves from our suffering caused by obsessive thinking, compulsive actions and the endless anxiety that underride our experience.

When it comes to emotions we often think these are something that we need to control. In doing my preliminary research for this series when I searched for yoga videos on emotions I found several that offered to control your emotions as well as release them for you.

When it comes to emotions many of us have resorted to imposing our will. Taking refuge in the will or a tyranny of the will as Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen say. It seems like if we control our emotions our life will seem a little less chaotic.

The very idea of opening to emotions might sound like a terrifying idea, especially if we find our emotional landscape anywhere along the spectrum of dangerous to inconvenient. The idea of opening to the free-flowing quality of our emotions just may seem like a completely dangerous one, especially if our lives are already feeling chaotic.

As Tim says, Melissa, people don´t want to rip off the band aid. What is underneath the control, the suppression, the tyranny of will be too gruesome. It might be too difficult for us to handle. We might have to let go of safety nets that we have come to rely on. This reminds me of a great Chogyamn Trungpa Rinpoche Quote, ¨The bad news is you are falling without a parachute. The good news is there is no ground.¨

We have this core belief, that for life to be smooth and undisturbed, it is a good idea for us to keep our feelings under strict control. This takes all kinds of forms, from not burdening others with our feelings, to having a stiff upper lip and chin up! The problem with control, is that all of our experience becomes dull and lifeless. We get cut off from all feeling - not just the emotions we don´t like, but the ones we want to feel as well.

Letting go of emotional discipline means releasing the repression of emotion and indifference to pleasure or pain - in other words as Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen say, ¨stepping off the tight-rope walk of tight-lipped stoicism.¨ The price we pay for emotional discipline is an inability to sympathise with anybody. We start to ossify and harden like bone.

The price of the emotional lobotomy for the promise of emotional control is too steep. We have dulled our sparkle. As as Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen say, ¨I know that life is a bit limited now that I´ve decided to put myself in this wheelchair, but at least I´ll never sprain my ankle again.¨

It is illogical to think that we should rise above our emotions as if human feelings are some kind of spiritual disability. According to as Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen say, ¨We are not looking to reject our emotional personality in favour of some kind of spiritual calm - a state in which the pause button has been securely depressed, where there is no chance of feeling anything at all.¨

We cannot vaccinate ourselves against life by rising above our emotions, this is not what it means to be spiritual. This is flying away to an imaginary land of rainbow and unicorns and escaping our very real lives of love, loss, regret and emotions.

In the coming weeks we will explore opening to our emotions as fluid fields of energy worthy of our exploration. For today, let´s focus completely on letting go of emotional discipline.

¨Our being is a brilliant pattern of energies, a spectrum of possibilities. At every moment we have the capacity to experience the open dimension of what we are.¨

Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen