Rupert Spira, in his book, The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience, explains in greater detail exactly what is involved in the process of welcoming difficult emotions. He also connects this process to the deepest spiritual perspective.
From The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience, by Rupert Spira, pages 240-242. Italics in […] are my commentary.
Questioner: What part do feelings and the body have to play in this investigation [of Consciousness and Presence]?
Rupert Spira: Much of the mind’s activity is designed to avoid feeling. For instance, any form of repetitive, compulsive thinking is usually a sign that just below its surface lies an uncomfortable well of feelings.
However, sooner or later, these uncomfortable feelings begin to percolate through the strategies and coping mechanisms that the mind has constructed.
The first impulse is usually to escape them through thinking and activity. In this way the cycle of seeking [for happiness and peace, an ultimate resolution to these uncomfortable feelings] is generated over and over again.
However, each time seeking is brought to an end in Understanding [that happiness and peace don’t come from thinking or activity, but rather Presence itself], one of the mind’s avenues of escape is cut off.
As a result, when uncomfortable feelings resurface, we find that there are fewer and fewer possibilities of denial and avoidance.
We no longer escape these feelings. We have the courage to face them. We do not do anything with them or to them and, by the same token, we do not deny, avoid or suppress them.
The impulse to escape them through thinking still appears, but that impulse itself is seen to be just one more uncomfortable feeling.
Sooner or later a deep conviction appears, a conviction that these feelings cannot be escaped, avoided, manipulated or glossed over. Nor need they be. And with this conviction comes the courage to face them.
We just allow them to be.
The openness, sensitivity, vulnerability, and availability that Consciousness is, that we are, is the allowing of all things.
This courage and openness to face our feelings is an invitation for deeper and deeper layers of feelings to emerge.
It is for this reason that, to begin with, the spiritual path does not always appear to be peaceful. Often there is an apparent increase in the level of discomfort and agitation.
However, that is a misinterpretation of what is really occurring. It is not new layers of discomfort and dis-ease that are being generated. It is age-old habits of feeling that are being exposed.
To begin with it is these feelings that occupy our attention. They seem to be all-consuming. However, as there is less and less impulse to avoid them, the welcoming space in which they are allowed to be, without any agenda for or against, is noticed more and more.
The welcoming space of our own Awareness, which once seemed to be in the background, or even eclipsed by these all-consuming feelings, begins to emerge and, as a result, the feelings begin to recede.
In fact, they don’t really recede. Devoid of the mental commentary that previously gave them meaning and validity, they are experienced more and more as innocuous bodily sensations.
In the way they lose their bite. They are neutralized, not because we have done anything to them, but simply because they have been seen for what they are.
Even to say that they are bodily sensations is too much. If we explore them in the same way that we explore any other object, we find that their very substance is the substance of the welcoming Presence in which they appear.
They have no separating power [power to make us believe that we are separate entities – that our minds and bodies are enclosed entities that are separate from other people and world around this. Much more on this topic in the rest of the book]. There is no suffering in them.
These sensations are like drops of milk in a jar of water [a metaphor described earlier in the book – when examined over time, they dissolve into Presence, just as a drop of milk in water initially appears to be separate from the water, but then over time completely dissolves in the water.] They are currents rippling through the ocean of our Self.
Nonduality Book Study Group
Rupert Spira writes some good stuff! Which is why I’ve devoted the next year to hosting a study group on Monday evenings (on a drop-in basis) to studying his book, along with a few related videos and passages from other teachers. The goal for this group is to really discuss, understand, and truly realize what is being talked about – not just learn a bunch of interesting ideas. Sound interesting to you?
Learn more about the study group or register to attend.
