Sitting with Suffering; Why we all should Meditate

Sitting With Suffering; Why we all should Meditate

By: Chris Linkenbach

The funny thing about an emotion is that you can run, you choose to sprint in any direction, any direction but within that is, and keep moving for a considerable amount of time. But we are not designed to run forever, and eventually the very thing you have been running from comes up and taps you on the shoulder like you’d never even left it. And that is because you haven’t. Emotions don’t have the opportunity to leave, to free themselves, until they have been fully felt and experienced. They hang around, showing glimpses of themselves and building like a dam of boiling water, manifesting themselves in our lives as a lash of anger, resentment, or frustration, against those around us and those we care about.

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There is probably a reason you have been drawn to this specific article. I ask you to examine your own life, are you truly allowing yourself to feel emotions, to cry, to laugh, to yell and scream out in frustration? Or do you do what our societal conditioning has taught us to do and bottle them up? It’s almost as if we have been programmed to feel shame about showing our own emotions. Many of us, regardless of gender have been told to “man up” at one point or another or possibly when we were children our parents might have told us to stop crying; thus invalidating our emotions in the moment and creating shame inside of us. Who declared that only certain emotions are allowed to be shown? 

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Our culture today, the world that we live in does not provide us with the necessary tools to deal with the same pressures that it demands us to be put under. It is a self-defeating cycle. We are not taught that emotions are a part of our everyday life, and that it is okay to feel emotions. I will repeat that previous sentence for those in the back of the room; it is okay to feel emotions. Even in our education system we are taught to use a compass and protractor, but not equipped with the proper way to handle our own nervous system.

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Not only does the current social atmosphere we currently live in teach us to become a numb, cold-hearted shell of a person, it somehow also promotes the idea that we should always be happy. That to have an off day is unacceptable. Even in examining social media, it appears that everyone seems to be having fun or is always doing something adventurous and exciting. It doesn’t show the existential suffering that they are also dealing with, because they too are human. Show me the social media account that talks about their experience of raw emotion, of the difficult parts of their life. Show me the social media account that instead of posting booty pics in Ibiza, discusses the time they cried in the shower or the time they were too depressed to get out of bed in the morning. They are few and far between. This is because in order to be accepted socially in our society, we are pressured to show off, regardless of what you are feeling inside. I am not condemning society, because society is the sum total of the individual. It’s rather healthy that we do not break down crying or yelling at another individual during every conversation we have, but these social skills also have taught us to contain our emotions in an unhealthy way. This has led us to hold onto many emotions that we do not want to feel. 

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Animals are constantly feeling their emotions. A dog will whine when it is sad, it will bark from excitement or potentially fear. Even as children, we would cry or laugh at the moment that our feelings were created. We experienced our emotions moment by moment. Adults on the other hand have lost this ability, choosing to store up our emotions, and we have not been properly taught how to deal with them. Instead of dealing with our emotions on the spot, we store them inside of our nervous system, and there they lie dormant waiting to be felt. Those repressed feelings of anger and sadness do not just lie there peacefully. They may be inactive for a while, but their pressure is only building, until they are strong enough to be felt by our conscious mind. Everytime we start to feel that familiar uncomfortable feeling of boredom, loneliness, depression, anger, begin to crawl its way back into our consciousness, we immediately look for a distraction. We check our phones, eat for no reason, watch netflix, or even turn to sexual pleasure or drugs in order to shut off the connection to our suffering. If you create walls and block off the possibility of feeling your pain, your anger, your suffering, you are also unintentionally blocking off the emotions of love, joy, and peace.

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One of the 4 Noble Truths that Gautama Buddha shared is that of the noble truth of suffering: “birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering” in summary, life is suffering whether we want it or not. What if we were to accept the fact that in our life, there will be times that we are going to experience difficult emotions. 

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What if we took an approach to society that whatever the mainstream is doing isn’t working. What if instead of hiding our emotions under a smile and the vice of our choice, we did the opposite. What would happen if you actually began to feel your emotions? This is where we talk about meditation.

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Meditation is a tool that we as humans can use to examine our nervous system from a place of pure awareness. Instead of falling into the anger or depression that we may become so familiar to, we are able to watch it from a place of neutrality. Let me show you what I mean. As you are reading this article, there is a voice talking inside of your head. Is that voice talking inside of your head “you”? Well no, because you are able to watch it. Do you see what I mean? You are watching, experiencing these words pop into your head from a place of  awareness. This is basically the premise of meditation. To dissociate from the emotions and thoughts that run our day to day life and learn to sit with them from a place of pure awareness. 

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Meditation is a tool that will indeed calm the mind. It puts your brain into a theta brain wave, or a state of pure relaxation, allowing healing to occur within your body. Through this process of healing your body will naturally begin to return to its place of balance or homeostasis, pushing out emotions that are blocked inside of you. As you bring your pure awareness to these emotions, allow yourself to feel them and experience them for what they are with no label, then you will begin to liberate yourself from the nauseous cycle of negative emotion. You will see them for what they really are, pure energy. Allowing these emotions to come up with no suppression will allow you to feel the emotions of love, joy, and true liberation more fully and from a place of presence. It is through constant practice that you will begin to recognize when an emotion is rising and passing from a place of pure awareness, not only in your meditative headspace, but inyour waking life as well. 

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Learning to recognize when you have an unpleasant feeling will allow you to act from a place of neutrality, rather than from a place of the anger or sadness that is forming. Learning to truly navigate and sit with your suffering with composure is an art of life. Becoming a master of your nervous system is a daunting task and a long path with winding hills and valleys, but it is a place of the purest reward and sense of peace as well. Give yourself 10 minutes of your own time to sit with yourself and watch, so that the rest of the 1,430 minutes in your day can flow.

Citations:

Four Noble TruthsWikipedia contributors. (2020, July 8). Four Noble Truths. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 00:55, July 10, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Four_Noble_Truths&oldid=966725541