Jim Cogley: Reflections Tues 25th June – Mon 1st July 2024
This weeks reflections about dealing with difficult emotions are a compilation of writings taken from several sources, one of them being Richard Rohr, combined with much of my own material drawn from experience.
My website is: jimcogley.com
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Tue 25th June – What we evade we can never avoid
People say we can’t help how we feel. It’s true we can’t help unpleasant, pleasant, or neutral feelings arising when one or more of the six senses have made contact with something that has a familiar feeling tone or reminds us of something that we went through at an earlier time but never allowed ourselves to feel. We multiply the intensity of feeling every time we move away from something pleasant or unpleasant; we create a vicious cycle of craving and aversion. This is a truth that is important to understand that what we evade we can never ultimately avoid. It is not by moving away from but towards that which seems so unpleasant that we find peace and healing. Unpleasant emotions and cravings will pursue us and not let us find peace until we give them space and allow them to have their place in our lives. These are all sacred parts of ourselves that seek to come home, they belong to our core Self and nowhere else. All suppression or repression can do is to consign them to thewaiting room of theunconscious.
Wed 26th June – Allowing feelings to dictate thinking
When people say they can’t help how they feel, they are usually talking about their emotions being out of control. We can help how we experience our emotions. They are created by our unconscious, our conditioning and our conscious thinking. Changing how we think about our emotions and not simply allowing ourselves to think and act through them is vital since simply following our feelings can land us in deep trouble and even in jail. Our emotions can make us deny in the dark what we have known to be true in the light. We make our emotions worse by reaching out for external stimuli, by blaming others when we feel vulnerable or upset. Before we know it, we are angry, resentful, self-righteous, and begin to inhabit a storehouse of toxic thoughts, which suppress our uncomfortable feelings of vulnerability.
Thurs 27th June – Being patient with how we feel
The word patience comes from the Latin word patior that means to suffer. If we are patient, and suffer with them, without being afraid of them, our feelings will change of their own accord—some quicker than others. Our emotions will begin to change and lose their intensity; they won’t dominate us or dictate our behaviour. Eventually toxic emotions will disappear and nontoxic thinking will start to arise in our hearts, and one day there will be just thoughts without a thinker. There will be sounds without a hearer, tastes without a taster, smells without a smeller, sights without a seer, and touch without a toucher. What I mean by all of this is that things will arise and we will not identify with them as me, mine, or I. This is like being aware of how we feel, good orbad, but being ‘holy’ indifferent towards our emotions, knowing that they no longer have the power to define or determine who I am.
Fri 28th June – Inner Hospitality
If we practice inner hospitality with our emotions the time will come where there will be no judgements, interpretations, or stories about what we have just perceived. We will see the bigger picture, and not be caught by the clash of the senses, not reacting to whatever we have made contact with. We will feel the unpleasantness, pleasantness, neutralness, or even the mixture of all three feelings, and will turn toward it without an agitated mind. The heart and mind will accept all of it without protesting. It’s when we protest and reject that toxic emotions begin to emerge and have a field day in our lives.
Sat 29th June – Repression
Our hearts simply well up with toxins because we push away our painful feelings. Many of us have a lifetime behind us of doing our utmost to push them down. We won’t allow ourselves to stop. Our busy lives don’t seem to give us time to feel our feelings. When we turn toward our experience, we will often find feeling tones or sensations in the body. We turn away from the experience in the body with thoughts and thinking. We try to compartmentalise in our heads thinking we have everything sorted. If we have the courage to face the feeling tone, we will discover there is nothing there, no I or me, just a flow of sensations that may be painful, pleasurable, or neutral. We need to always give space to whatever emotion that is, and so to treat it as a friend rather than an enemy.
Sun 30th June – Exploring Healing
When we look at the ministry of Christ, we find that he was nearly always engaged in healing of one kind or another. Sometimes it was of the miraculous kind like the woman with the haemorrhage or the little girl in today’s Gospel, but more often it was about helping people come to terms with their lives and how their past was affecting their present. So, he helped them to tell their story; he reassured them of God’s mercy and taught the importance of forgiveness, both towards themselves and others. He encouraged people to let go of judgements, to be less critical, always to look for the good and to love their neighbour as they loved themselves.
There is a quote from the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu that I have used on many occasions in relation to healing. ‘None of us have the power to say, ‘Let bygones be bygones and hey presto they become bygones. Our common experience is just the opposite, that, the past far from disappearing or lying down and being quiet is embarrassingly persistent and will return to haunt us unless it has been dealt with adequately. If you don’t own your own story, then your story will own you, and for the rest of your life. Understand your story or it will play havoc with your life for the rest of your life.’
Only in recent years are we coming to realise that we don’t bury issues dead, rather we bury them alive and that in doing so we deny a part of ourselves. For so long we operated on the principle that what we don’t know can’t hurt us whereas now we are being forced to acknowledge that it is precisely what we don’t talk about that can affect us the most. In other words, it is our past that continues to influence our present and in all sorts of ways. So, we end up taking pills for depression but never ask the question, ‘What am I depressing?’ We might be irritable and difficult to live with but never look at what I need to forgive myself for. We may go to a doctor to have our symptoms cured while failing to look at the underlying cause of what is creating the problem in the first place.
A man once told me that all his life he had been burdened by a feeling of being ugly and that it had really held him back in his ability to relate to others. To anyone seeing him he looked quite normal but to himself he was ugly. His very first memory when little more than a toddler was of his mother asking his elder sisters to get messages from the shop and to take him for the walk. They kicked up a fuss and one of them said, ‘If anyone sees us with that ugly little yoke they will laugh us silly.’ It was just a throwaway remark by a sister who was in a strop but for him it was a poisoned arrow that pierced his heart and continued to release its venom for the rest of his life. How many of us carry deep wounds from careless and insensitive remarks made by significant people in our childhoods that still affect how we see ourselves as adults in the world.
Everyone has a story and every story is sacred and deserves to be heard and treated with the utmost respect. The first time we open up our story to another it takes a lot of courage because we might just be admitting something to ourselves for the very first time. After doing that we feel a lot lighter and soon it becomes easier to share it with others in a manner that could be helpful for them.
Who gets up our nose?
The carving shown is one made during Covid lockdown. At first sight it seems like someone with a dirty grin picking his nose but it was made more with a question in mind, ‘Who is it that gets up our nose?’ There will always be people in our families and communities who we will find ourselves reacting to. These are those who, for some reason, push our buttons and we find ourselves uncomfortable in their presence, blaming them for how we feel or just having nothing to do with them altogether. If instead of acting so childish we could only stop and see that this person is just a huge mirror showing me something in myself that I least want to see but most need to know. Instead of ranting on and on about that so and so and how they behave if I could just stop the finger pointing and ask the basic question; ‘What is it in me that is causing me to react to that person?’ In other words, ‘What is it that is going on in me that is causing my upset?’ Perhaps they remind me of someone else in my earlier life who was angry, manipulative or controlling. Someone who put me down may be long dead but alive and well in someone else. So, let’s be a little more mature, nobody ever upsets me and nobody ever has. I upset myself by how I choose to react and that’s what I need to take responsibility for. Blaming gets me nowhere while taking responsibility for how I am feeling and reacting is what puts me on the path of Christian discipleship.
Mon 1st July – The Burning Bush
A useful image for how we might deal with intense emotions is to be found in the Book of Exodus where God appears to Moses in the form of a burning bush. Moses is told ‘to take off his shoes that he is standing on holy ground’. Then he notices that while the bush is burning it is not being consumed by the flames. This is a brilliant insight as to how we experience what we perceive to be the destructive power of our most intense emotions. We feel and we fear that we will be consumed, that we will be burned up and not survive. In fact, they may be so ‘hot’ that we may be convinced that we could not possibly come through this experience unscathed. Yet by some miracle we do, and like Moses, with a much clearer sense of our mission in life. In effect, we become enlightened and have grown in awareness as a result of the experience.