The Ultimate Truth 2 - Into The Jaws Of The Tiger

In the first part of this series of posts, I discussed a bit of a paradox about acceptance. To really practice acceptance, you have to accept that sometimes you don't accept things. Sometimes you do get angry (or whatever), but that's OK.

To explain a bit more about this, here's a quote from Sri Bhagavan. (It is worth also reading the whole of this quote. You can find it here.):

"Whatever you are, just accept it. When you accept it, there is no conflict... Physical pain itself will become bliss. Sincerely experience all psychological pain. If you fully experience, it becomes joy. Don't try to escape. If you try to escape from pain, you are putting it under the carpet. After some time it starts stinking. That is what most people are doing. They never confront their pain. Somebody dies in your family, you lose your job, some other problem, but you don't experience the pain. You run away from the pain...

"Suppose a tiger enters this room. Most of you would climb up on the fan and hang on there! What I am telling you is that hanging from the fan is really pain because the tiger is here and you are hanging on there... Come down from the fan and let the tiger eat you. If you are eaten, the pain is gone. Allow the pain to eat you. The pain is the tiger. See what happens. It will become joy."

Huh?

When I first read this, I couldn't relate to it at all. Pain becoming joy? That didn't seem likely. And who wants to be eaten by a tiger anyway?

It was only when I started trying it out for myself that I began to understand what it was all about. "Whatever you are, just accept it," says Sri Bhagavan. So one day, I did just that...

I was consumed with anger over some household skirmish or other. The emotion was out of proportion to what had happened and just wouldn't go away. It was hanging around to such an extent that it was really annoying me. Know what I mean? I didn't want to be annoyed but I was annoyed nevertheless, and the fact that it carried on just stoked my annoyance further. I was caught up in a vicious circle of disgruntlement.

But Sri Bhagavan's words came to mind and I decided to give them a try. I turned things around and deliberately welcomed the anger. I embraced it. I breathed it in as though it was an exotic fragrance. I don't know how I did it exactly, but I did it nevertheless. And then suddenly something wonderful happened. It was like turning a key in a door. All of a sudden, like magic, the anger was gone.

How could this have happened?

I think the process is best explained by Carl Jung's phrase: "what we resist persists". This seems to be what happens with emotions. The emotion gets stuck because we don't want to feel it. We don't want it to be there.

It's this resistance to the emotion which is the problem. The resistance stops us expressing the emotion. And unless we can fully express it, it won't be released.

What we have to do is to allow the emotion to be. Allow ourselves to fully feel the emotion. Only then will the emotion be released.

How quickly this happens depends on what is going on in our lives. If something truly tragic has happened - something really big - it's only natural that we're going to feel bad for a while. But even in this situation, it seems to me that the process of working through our emotions will be speeded up if we can drop the resistance and truly accept how we're feeling.

In a great many cases, however, we have much less genuine reason to feel so bad. A lot of the time, what we're feeling is out of proportion to whatever has happened. This is because the event has served as a trigger, and suppressed emotions from earlier, similar events have come to the surface.

And why do we have such suppressed emotions?

It's the same story again. Because in those earlier times, we did not allow ourselves to fully express those emotions - and what we resisted persisted. The emotions have remained with us, bubbling under. Now they have risen to the surface again in order to be released.

We therefore have two choices. We can either refuse to accept the way we are feeling and so maintain our store of pent-up emotions, or we can simply accept those emotions, allow them to be - and be rid of them forever.

Next time, I'll be looking at how we can put this into practice... 

 

These may also be of interest:

The Ultimate Truth 3 - Breathe Away Your Emotions

Deeksha

Comments

[mergingpoint]

Yes Simon, its for each one to experience the words of wisdom. Wish to add what i had learnt from my Master.
Pain is not to be solved but to be dissolved.
You watch it getting dissolved and hence there is no more relapse of the same.
Also, accepting pain as God sent to know your own self. In Tantra shastra, there is this slokha," wherever the mind goes, Shiva exists there" Shiva denotes the silence, the Divinity, Godliness.
Great post Simon!

[vinni]

hey simon,

wonderful post. i remember my mom told me this when i was a kid. we learnt all this, in the gitas.

[Marion]

Super post, Simon...it feels so much better afterwards to Stand and Face it...it is finding the courage to do so that takes time, for me sometimes.

[Sue Ann Edwards]

(Smiling.) Take any fear. Call it out.

Actually make an appointment: I'll meet you face to face to get this settled once and for all at 'such-n-such' time. Tell it you'll even meet it in its own space: a dark room.

And you'll find nothing will ever come to meet you...

[Simon]

Merging point – “Accepting pain as God sent to know yourself”: I really like that. In part three of this series (which I’ve already written), I’ve got a list of reasons why we should accept our ‘painful’ emotions. That’s another one I could have added. Perhaps I still will…

Vinni – Wow! – that’s great advice to be given as a kid. Mine was more along the lines of: “make sure you wash your hands before you eat!” I suspect that Bhagavan first came across it in the gitas too.

Marion – I think it takes courage for most of us, Marion, though I find that increasingly I don’t have any choice but to face my emotions. They refuse to hide away any more.

Sue Ann – Thanks. That’s incredibly powerful – you should do a post around that one (or maybe a children's story!)
(I corrected the typo – never saw it till you pointed it out!)

Thanks to you all for your comments!

[HomeSpun Healers]

I enjoyed this post. I especially like the quote "What we resist persist." Isn't there another quote that says something about what we fight grows stronger? I am still trying to grasp these concepts. I think it's human nature to struggle with things much too long.

Great blog you have here, and thank you for commenting on my blog as well.

[Simon]

Thanks HomeSpunHealers - It's lovely to hear from you. I enjoyed reading your blog too.

"What we fight grows stronger" sounds familiar. I guess the two expressions mean much the same thing.

I loved the quote on your site about resentment: “Resentment is like a glass of poison that a man drinks, then sits down and waits for his enemy to die.” That illustrates just how ridiculous some of our emotions can be. The object of the emotion isn't harmed at all - only us! Sometimes, we can use a rational argument like this to convince ourselves that it no longer serves us to hold an emotion. We should use whatever strategy works for us...