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Fear and Shock

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The Steps Toward Self Empowerment

The Steps Toward Self-Empowerment
Krishnananda

How many of you can recall situations in which you felt unjustly treated or taken advantage of and you did not stand up for yourself? Or remember finding yourself in a situation where you felt small and insignificant? Or recall generally feeling overwhelmed? For me, it has been too often to count and I always hated that feeling of collapse or of not being able to stand up for myself. I imagine these feelings are common. And then we watch a movie like “Rambo 2 – First Blood” or “Shooter” and a primitive place inside of us is totally rooting for the hero who overcomes impossible odds and takes revenge on all the people who wronged him. What is going on inside of us in these moments?

We all have a deep longing to feel mastery of our life. Because somewhere along the way, most of us lost a sense of personal power. We lost an ability to feel and to trust our own way and to speak out or take action when something didn’t feel right. A client of mine works as a managing director for a small tech company. He feels overwhelmed to the point of having crippling panic attacks because he feels he cannot live up to the demands that are being made on him by his boss whom he finds unreasonably impatient and tyrannical. Furthermore, he can’t imagine setting a limit with his boss because he has tremendous fears that he will be fired and is terrified that if he loses this job, he will not be able to find another. He is so distraught that he is at the point of taking an extended sick leave. But inside, he feels that would be a failure.

Another client of mine feels intimidated by and defensive with her elderly mother. Up until recently, she would call her three or four times a week out of a sense of duty, but always felt uncomfortable on the phone because she can think of nothing to say. She does not want to share anything personal because she feels that her mother “never listens, she either tries to smooth over whatever I say, or just gives me advice.” Now at least, she has stopped calling as often but feels guilty for “abandoning her”. When we explored her past history with her mother, she tells me about one shocking episode of abuse and disrespect after another. But the thought of confronting her mother about what she went through in the past or even with the ways she feels disrespected today brings up feelings of overwhelming terror and horrible guilt.

Our loss of personal power runs very deep. Often, we may not even be aware that we are being disrespected because for so long, we are used to being treated this way. We may even feel we deserve to be treated in this way or it may be that we cannot imagine another way. Furthermore, we may not recognize or feel when we have been disrespected because we are too much in shock at the time it occurred to be aware of what was happening. Then later, we may become aware of the invasion and obsess about “what I should have said.” (I sometimes joke in our workshops that I could have written several books just on “what I would have, should have said.” )

The traumas from the invasions, insensitivities and neglect of childhood had two highly significant impacts on our loss of personal power. It generated profound shock in our nervous system that still causes crippling frozenness and anxiety in our life. The second result of these traumas is that they created a self-identity as a victim. When a child is disrespected or abused, he or she develops a sense of him or herself that “this is how I deserve to be treated.” A profound sense of self develops which is based on being put down, belittled, violated, infantilized or ignored. So, rather than developing a sense of inherent dignity, the child shrinks in self-doubt and self-diminishment.

I grew up with a brother two years older who was an all around “wunderkind”. He super-excelled in everything that seemed important at the time - scholastics, athletics and social stature. Everyone looked up to him, even my parents. I idealized him and imitated him, (as best as I could) but I always felt second rate. My sense of self has based not on my own achievements (which by other standards would be more than satisfactory) but on standards that were compared to his achievements. I was “the younger brother” of this phenomenon. That’s what made me feel important and valuable. I basked in his reflection. When we competed (and we did that a lot – in monopoly, tennis, ping pong and a special hockey board game that we played all the time), he almost always won. (Later, he admitted that he cheated at monopoly by stealing from the bank. I felt totally betrayed because while I might cheat with someone else, never with my older brother.) He would also tease me (that’s what older siblings do, right?) and I took it and believed it. Why? Because he was my older brother and he was god. Since I couldn’t win, I developed an identity as “lovable fuck-up”. My brother used to call me, “the great source of mis-information.”

Later (in therapy) I learned that I developed a powerful sense of self as someone second rate, as someone who expected to lose even if I applied myself and as someone who gained self-esteem by idealizing someone else. I also learned that becoming the “loveable fuck-up” was how I got love and attention from my parents. The problem is, deep inside, I felt irresponsible and incompetent and that inner sense haunted me for a long time. It felt as though that programming was hardwired.

But there is a positive side to this story. (There usually is.) The pain I felt from these experiences forced me to go inside and find myself. It set me on a journey of self-discovery and motivated me to create the work that my partner, Amana, and I do today. I realized at some point that I had a gift and a passion for working as a therapist and as a teacher. Inside, I knew that this was my work and my mission in life. I just knew it. So, I dived into learning it with all my intensity and focus. I paid my dues, got degrees, read countless books and sought out all kinds of teachers to learn from and inspire me.

Although in many ways, I followed the example of my family conditioning in terms of dedication to education and career, I also did something very different. I became involved with Eastern meditation and became a disciple of an Indian enlightened master. Finding the courage and commitment to pursue my truth and my dreams gave me immense self-respect and also a sense of who I am. Slowly, I overcame my negative self-image as a victim, a loser and a fuck-up. I saw that when I followed my intuition, my inner truth and applied myself, I could excel at what I did. And my fulfillment came not from being “better” than anyone but from simply sharing what I had learned and continue to learn. The more we become grounded in what we do; the more our fulfillment no longer comes from outside approval, success or recognition, but from an inner feeling of “rightness”.

I also came to accept myself much more with my shortcomings. For instance, I am still hopeless at details. (Fortunately Amana, is amazing with details so she picks up after all the little messes that I leave.) Oh, by the way, my relationship with my brother now is great. As I healed, he fell back to earth. We are good friends, we love and respect each other, and we even trade victories in tennis. Today, it is rare that I find myself getting sucked back into the old way of feeling myself when I am with him, and I recover quickly.

Coming back to the two clients I mentioned earlier. The man was physically abused by his father. Physical abuse from a parent generally creates a deep inner sense of impotence and helplessness. But even worse, it creates an inner sense of wrongness. My client not only feels impotent and defenseless in response to the attacks and criticism of his boss but also wrong and guilty. He takes the blame and the rage and turns it on himself.

My other client defended herself from the abuse of her mother by becoming compliant. Most of us defend against disrespect and abuse from a parent by becoming compliant, because it is usually much too threatening to rebel. In her case, she was slapped in the face when she expressed any objection. In such and similar cases, the rebellious energy inside of us goes into hiding, often expressing itself as passive aggressiveness, self-destructiveness and depression. The compliant side is still running their lives. It fends off the guilt and the fear of taking a stand. But it leaves them feeling anxious and dis-empowered.

What could help my two clients to heal? To answer, I would like to describe four aspects of empowerment that have helped me.

1. Listening to Our Inner Voice.

We have a small voice inside of us. It is the voice of our inner knowing. This voice is like a guide directing us toward our truth and directing us away from what is negative and unsupportive. We stopped listening to this inner knowing because most of us were not supported to hear it. But it is still there.

It is telling us what we love, what inspires us, what our passion is and what we are gifted at. It knows in what way we are meant to express ourselves. It knows how the divine energy wants to manifest through us. At first, it can be a bit difficult to hear this voice or feel the feeling of our inner knowing because we are not used to listening. But if we take some time to slow down and go inside and focus on listening, it will speak to us. Then, as we begin to hear this voice again, we can take steps to realize it.

I can’t say exactly how I discovered this voice. Meditation helped for sure and so did realizing that I can lost contact with it. I also remember vividly some years ago while doing a workshop, I felt so inspired by the workshop leader that I said to myself, “Wow, this is what I would really love to do and I know I could be good at it.” Once I discovered this for myself, I also needed to apply myself. Dreams don’t come true by themselves. We have to work for them. But the very process of working toward a goal with focus and intensity is incredibly empowering. When I knew what I wanted and felt the sense of purpose and commitment to make it happen, it gave me direction and an inner sense that I was on the right track. There were countless obstacles that I had to overcome. At times, I have felt deeply discouraged. But I kept going because I trusted my passion and my vision.

There is another side of this inner voice, this inner feeling. It also tells us when we are doing, saying or placing ourselves in situations that are not right for us. It acts as an inner guide. I feel it as a body feeling, or as a pain in my stomach or sometimes as nagging thoughts in my head that are revisiting a past moment again and again. It seems to be saying, “Something was not right there.” There is a practical way of becoming more conscious of when our guide is giving us these signals. Instead of just moving on, we start to pay closer attention to how we feel in specific situations and with specific people in our life. Then, we naturally start becoming aware of what feels right and what doesn’t.

2. Learning About Our Past Conditioning.

We also become empowered by gaining insight about our past conditioning and how it affected and continues to affect us. This has two aspects. One is becoming aware of the tyranny of our inner judge. The second is appreciating the depth of our shock and the terror that still lives inside of us because of past traumas.

It is very important to discover the values, roles and the identity that we formed as a result of our past experiences. Practically, it means paying attention to the negative voice in our head that is constantly judging, controlling, criticizing and condemning us. This is the energy of our inner judge that we can hear or feel inside of us or projected out on others, especially authority figures. This energy becomes particularly strong if we fail or are rejected or if we have, as in the case of my client, a critical or demanding authority. Once we discover the voice of our inner judge, we can begin to question its values, rules and standards. We also gain insight about our negative conditioning by recognizing the roles we adopted as a child to gain love and respect. Generally, these roles have little to do with who we were and are and they caused us to lose touch with ourselves.

I discovered about this negative conditioning by going into individual and group therapy. Piecing that together has brought me immense compassion for myself. When we don’t take this journey of self-discovery, we blame ourselves endlessly for not living up to our own standards or the standards of others. We blame and castigate ourselves for not being able to stand up for ourselves. And even worse, when we don’t understand the dysfunction of our childhood conditioning and the ways we were damaged and disrespected, we may still idealize our parents and accept their values, judgments and opinions without questioning them. We don’t appreciate how they and their values may continue to re-enforce our negative self-image.

3. Generating Life Energy.

The third aspect of empowerment that I have found helpful is mobilizing our body energy. Practically, we build inner strength when we pick some physical activity that we enjoy and commit to sticking with it on a regular basis. It can be just about anything – yoga, martial arts, kick boxing, running, working out at the gym, a sport or dance, but it is good if it stretches us a little. The stretch breaks old negative mind patterns.

Moving our body generates life energy and that in turns nourishes our inner rebel. I found that by moving my body physically and by keeping my energy level high, I could feel the indignities that I had suffered. It also helped me to see that the victim identity that I had formed was not real. Plus, generating life energy just feels good and the better we feel inside and about ourselves, the easier it is to feel motivated and positive about life. (Sounds very American but actually, it’s true)

3. Risking

The fourth major ingredient of empowerment, from my experience, is risking. But risk has to take into account our shock and our fear otherwise; we may step over that part of us and become hard and insensitive. When we appreciate and embrace our profound fear and shock, we have take risks that are small enough that the fear does not overwhelm us. We call them “baby steps.”

Practically, this means taking the smallest of steps that challenge our fears and stretch our normal way of living and doing. The quality of risk helps us to recognize that fear does not have to run our lives. Each time we take a risk, we gain a small victory over our fears. A child cannot make that choice because it is usually much too overwhelming. But as an adult, we can take little risks because we are stronger, more resourced and generally less available to the abusers of our childhood. We even suggest that people incorporate the quality of risk into their lifestyle so that they are taking little risks regularly.

There are many ways to risk but one of the most significant ones we can take is to question the values, standards, rules and roles we learned as a child and to take actions that directly go against them. We call it, “stepping out of the box”. The “box” has defined us since early childhood, giving us a code of morality and behavior that has ensured us approval and love. It can define what career we should pursue, what kind of person we should be with in relationship, what our major values in life should be, what kind of friends to have, how much money to make, how our body should look and even what we should eat. Most of us became good little boys and girls and complied these standards, rules and roles.

When we start to “step out of the box”, we begin a process of separating from our family conditioning. We are taking the risk of discovering that we are different, of finding out who we are in our essence rather than who we were taught to become. One of the most important insights I ever had was realizing that I had a totally different perspective on life and why I was here than my family did. Certainly, I am motivated to achieve. (Probably if you had been raised in my family, you would be too.) But for many years, my main priority in life has been about emotional and spiritual growth. By seeing that I was different, I had to let go of the comfort of the sense of belonging to my family. We get much of our identity from that sense of belonging but it is identity that is not rooted in our being. It is given to us, not something we discover for ourselves.

It is also big risk to confront someone when we feel disrespected. It took me a long time before I could do that. There was just too much fear. And once I recognized that I needed to say something to someone, it felt like it was too late or no longer important. But slowly, I learned, even if at first my voice was shaking and it was hard to find the words. To my surprise, as I learned to express what hurt me or how I felt disrespected without attacking, blaming or accusing, nearly always, the response I got was positive. It is still not easy, not my any means, but I can do it. However, I don’t encourage my clients to take that step unless they come to it on their own.

Both of the clients I mentioned earlier have taken significant steps out of the box. It has helped them to begin to see how their victim identities were formed and to feel the terror inside of standing up to authority of any kind. It is also helping them to slowly discover and validate how they are different and to validate their own gifts and strengths. While it seems not yet time for either to directly confront the people who are being disrespectful toward them, I have seen over and over again, both with myself and those we work with, that as we develop more love and respect for ourselves, we naturally feel ready to take the risk of standing up for ourselves when we need to. We can take it as an opportunity to respect ourselves even more.

All of these steps have a way of building on each other and profoundly changing the way we see life and ourselves. It is not in our nature to feel like victims, to collapse our vital life energy or to tolerate disrespect from others. But many of us, because of our past, have adopted an identity which invites disrespect and which fosters a feeling of collapse and inferiority. To live in this way is a deep suffering. By gently following the steps that I have outlined here, we can reverse these negative opinions and feelings toward ourselves. I say this from my own experience. It takes some understanding, work, commitment and perseverance. But it is well worth it.

The Four Steps of Empowerment

1. Listening to Our Inner Voice.

2. Becoming Aware of Our Negative Childhood Conditioning.

3. Taking Small Risks to Challenge Our Fears.

4. Generating Life Energy.

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When Sex Becomes Vulnerable (Excerpt from Our New Book)

Introduction:
Keeping Our Sex Life Alive
For many years, we have been leading workshops in which we teach people how to love – themselves and another. One of the topics that very often arises, particularly for couples that have been together for sometime, is how to keep their sexuality alive. Couples notice that often the longer they are together; the more difficult it is to maintain the same interest in making love. Life’s stresses, familiarity and lack of communication may wear away at their desire to make love. Perhaps they long for those early days when they couldn’t wait to jump into bed and have hot, passionate sex. Or maybe they long for a deeper way to connect through lovemaking but it doesn’t happen.

Sex changes as intimacy deepens. But unless you appreciate and learn how to adjust to the change, you may not know how to deal with it. Sex is a significant aspect of togetherness; if it fades, it can threaten the relationship. And if it fades, you may easily get restless or resentful. You may begin having affairs or become resigned, bitter and/or depressed. Or you may find yourself drawn to other things like the computer, television, work, sports or other hobbies and not take the time to connect with your partner.

When you come closer to someone, you become more vulnerable. That vulnerability usually also means greater fears and insecurities. Sex can bring up feelings of vulnerability more strongly than just about any experience in your life. Most of can remember painful and humiliating or even frightening moments related to our sexuality. And sometimes, we may not know that we are traumatized sexually but our body is showing fear without your even knowing it. It is frozen fear, what we call “shock” that can cause sexual dysfunction. If you have not explored, understood or accepted your fears and insecurities, particular in connection to your sexuality, you may not know what to do or even what they are when they arise. You may feel that something is wrong with you or with the relationship. You may try to compensate for the fears by pushing yourself in sex in a way that doesn’t feel right.

When we are feeling frightened or insecure while making love, it drastically affects how we respond and also the way we want to make love. In lovemaking, especially as we come closer to another person, it becomes more and more crucial to feel safe.

It is natural and even healthy that the kind of excitement that was present in the honeymoon period of the relationship may fade. Excitement may happen easily when you are making love to someone you have just met. But if it diminishes with time, you may try to keep the excitement going one way or another. These methods become increasingly artificial and contrived. The solution to this problem is to discover something deeper and more sustaining that eventually replaces your need for perpetual excitement.

Excitement cannot be the sustaining force in the sexuality of a long-term relationship.

As we sat down to write this book, we had been together for fourteen years. We met originally in India where we were both practicing meditation and living in a spiritual commune. One of the aspects of the commune was an active program of growth workshops. When we first got together as a couple, we decided to take a two-week tantra (sexuality) workshop. The course was teaching a way of integrating meditation and sexuality in a specific approach and technique of lovemaking that attracted us. (We will be describing this approach in some detail in a later chapter.)

At the time we took this workshop, I (Krish) was also seeking for a change in the way I had been making love. One reason was that I was seeking deeper, more loving and more meditative connecting in sex. But there was another reason. In my lovemaking, I was afraid of coming too fast when I or my partner got excited. I felt intense shame when it happened and I couldn’t really relax because of this fear. The method we learned stressed connection rather than performance and taught lovemaking in such a relaxed, non-doing way that something inside of me deeply relaxed. I noticed that when I took the time to relax and became more focused on the connection rather than on the excitement of lovemaking, something changed for me. The absence of pressure and expectations has helped me to recover from my insecurity and dysfunction. In fact, we have found that this absence of pressure and demands in sex is one of the most important ingredients that allow couples to keep their love and sex life alive.

It was also very nourishing for me (Amana) to discover that lovemaking can be so relaxing and deeply satisfying without doing anything. I found that just by connecting and allowing the bodies and the energies to melt, something much deeper happens than can happen with a lot of doing. In fact this workshop prepared our relationship for a different way of being together, where lovemaking is not about excitement or sexual satisfaction but rather about connecting.

In our own sexual relationship, we continue to face challenges of encountering fears and insecurities and working through them. What’s more, in just about any deep relationship, each person’s wounds have a way of triggering the wounds of the other. And each person has to confront deeply unconscious and automatic ways that he or she pushes the other person away and hides. And then retreats from making love. In our own case, Krish’s fears of being overwhelmed by a powerful woman and then going into shock (originating from a strong and overpowering mother) can run a collision course with Amana’s experience of her man’s not being present (originating from an alcoholic father who escaped into addiction and eventually killed himself.) With love and awareness, we have managed to deal with this dynamic in a creative way.

As we go deeper into intimacy, we need to understand how fear, shame, shock and self-doubt affects our sexuality. We need to learn how to communicate our experience in sex, particularly our vulnerabilities. And most likely, our sexuality may need to adjust and incorporate our increased vulnerability.

But there is more to a healthy sexual relationship for a long-term couple than learning to make sensitive love. You also have to keep your emotional house clean and work toward deepening the love between you. There were twelve couples that took the workshop together with us. But as far as we know, of the twelve, we are the only couple that survived. And the reason these relationships ended, for the most part, was because unresolved emotional conflicts tore apart the fiber of their love.

We have been able to keep our love and our sexuality very much alive partly because we have made it a priority from the beginning to deal with anything that creates distance and hurt between us. Our intimacy is such that we can feel it whenever something disturbs our closeness. We have learned, from working with ourselves, that when we feel triggered, reactive or distant from each other, it is mostly because some early wound has been opened which we are still sensitive about. Or, it can be because we are feeling stressed and we take out that stress on the other person.

Sex can be the first causality of unresolved conflicts and undealt with stress. You may have no idea that you are heading into an emotional minefield when you come close to someone. You just want things to flow harmoniously and conflict-free as they may have done in the early days of your togetherness. Love is not like that. Love brings up your unresolved wounds, your fears of invasion and abandonment, your dependency, your fears of losing yourself in the other person, your expectations and your buried resentments toward the opposite sex.

We all need tools and understanding to navigate through all the emotional issues that come up. We need to know what is being triggered, how to deal with it inside and above all, how to communicate. Most of us didn’t have much experience with learning these lessons before we found ourselves in a relationship. We didn’t go to “intimacy school” before falling in love.

What’s more, most of the time, your reactions and disturbances may have little or nothing to do with the other person. They have to do with a lack of inner space in the moment and feeling overwhelmed by life. When you get provoked or stressed, often all you want to do is blame someone or something or find someone or something to make you feel better. And when you lack inner space, the smallest thing that the other person does or any kind of life stressor, disappointment or frustration can easily provoke your agitation and fears and cause you to react. When you are reacting on each other, sex suffers.

Behind our conflicts, resentments and hurt is fear and pain. It is a big part of the inner world of our vulnerability.. Yet vulnerability is also the doorway to the most profound and precious parts of ourselves, to the treasures of our soul and to the heart of intimacy.

This book is not a tantra book. It does not deal with teaching new and different ways of making love in order to improve orgasm or using sex to attain to ecstatic states. That is not our expertise and there are many excellent books that deal with these topics. In this book, we provide a roadmap for bringing sex and vulnerability together so that it can become a way of deepening and enriching intimacy. Too often, relationships and sex falter because of lack of understanding of our underlying sensitivities and lack of tools to communicate and resolve hurts and resentments. It is our sincere hope that we can provide concrete ways to deal with these issues in these pages. In the course of the book, we give examples from our own life and also from those of people we have worked with. Naturally, to protect the confidentiality of those we discuss, we either omit to mention names or we have changed the names of those we discuss.

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What It Means To Communicate

What It Means To Communicate
Krishnananda and Amana

Recently, we were doing some work with a couple who were struggling in their relationship. They had been together for twelve years and had two children. It seemed that they fought about everything – about raising their children, about sex, about finances, and about where and when to go on holidays. The woman complained that her husband was too lenient and blamed him for their teenage daughter spending time with “the wrong crowd.” She felt he was too aggressive in sex, did not share with her about their financial situation and always wanted to vacation where he could play golf. The man complained that she did not really listen to her children, that she never initiated sex, she was irresponsible with money and she wanted to go to boring places on holiday.

Given that scenario, one would ask naturally wonder why they were still together. But strangely enough, they still loved each other and had much in common. The problem was that they could not communicate. They could not listen to each other. Whenever they tried to talk about things, they invariably would end up yelling at each other and one of them would either storm away or hang up the phone in frustration. But there is every possibility that these two can learn to talk and listen to each other. What was missing are some simple tools.

Communication, in essence, is two people exchanging information with each other. We have communicated when afterwards, we know more about the other person – more about his or her feelings, thoughts, perspective and inner world. Problems arise when we are so emotional and fearful of not being heard or taken in that we can no longer listen to each other and we no longer express ourselves in a way that helps the other person to understand. We may have become so hurt and resentful, that we are not communicating, we are venting. And we are not listening either. But both may think they are communicating.

To communicate, one person needs to be expressing himself or herself in a way that helps the other person to listen. On the other hand, the person who is listening needs to listen. We can’t do that if we are preoccupied with defending ourselves, getting the last word and being right. (We often say in our work that we can have love or be right but we can’t have both.) So when we are the listener, it is important to check if we are able to take in and feel what the other person is saying.

In order to sustain a deep and meaningful intimacy, we have to learn to communicate. And to do that, we need to try to express ourselves in a way that does not provoke defensively in the other person and we need to do our best to be open to listen. But there are some important understandings and insights that are pre-requisites for being able to communicate.

1. Emotions don’t express themselves in a way that helps the other person to hear us. They often wish to attack, blame or punish the other person and provoke defensiveness, hurt and resentment. Also, emotions don’t listen well. They motivate us to defend and prove that we are right. In order to communicate, we need to understand when we are taken over by our emotions and expressing or listening from that space. We need to understand the difference between when we are expressing ourselves like an emotional child and when we have some centeredness and composure. It is not that we are wrong or bad for venting, but it is important to understand that the emotional child in us does not communicate, she or he vents.

2. In an intimate relationship, we naturally project our unmet childhood needs on our partner and become upset when they are not met. However, our partner is not responsible to meet these needs. Until we become aware of our projections, we will contaminate our efforts to communicate in a mature way with childish expectations. For intimacy to work, we can discover what and when we consciously or unconsciously project on our partner and own it back.

3. In an intimate relationship, we naturally project on our partner our sensitivities of being disrespected. When this sensitivity is triggered, we react automatically, habitually and unconsciously. Again, when we are not aware of our sensitivities based on our childhood history of invasions, we will overreact when these sensitivities are provoked. This also will contaminate our ability to communicate in a mature way.

4. It is important for any two people in a relationship to understand why conflict arises. Often, we can distinguish between two different situations that cause conflict. One is when we feel that we are not getting the presence, attention, love, appreciation and support or caring that we expect. We call this, “deprivation”. When we feel deprived, we can become highly emotional and reactive because it uncovers a fear that we will never get what we need. But in these moments, our healing movement is to learn to contain our frustration, pain and fear and find nourishment in ways that do not involve the other person. That does not mean we cannot express our hurt, but not if it carries expectation. The other situation we often encounter that provokes conflict involves situations in which we feel disrespected or invaded by the other person. In these cases, our healing movement is to express our hurt and learn to set a limit. Learning to make this distinction helps immensely for healthy communication.

We will react emotionally in a similar way in either of these situations. Therefore, it is not easy to tell them apart. Two examples might make this distinction more clear. A couple that we worked with built resentment with each other because of both of these two different situations were occuring. The man felt hurt and upset because during the day, while at work, she continually called him on his cell phone, interrupting him and expecting attention. She even became angry when he was unavailable to reach or if he turned off his cell phone during a meeting. This is a clear case of deprivation and her healing movement to learn to contain her fear. From his side, it was important for him to express directly to her that he felt invaded by her calling and demanding his attention and lovingly say ask her to respect his time when he is working.

In the other situation, she complained that he criticized and judged her for the kind of friends she had and in general treated her like a little girl. It was hard for her to tell him directly that she felt this as an invasion when he belittled her and had opinions about her friends. But that was precisely her healing movement in these times. For his side, it was important for him to recognize that his treatment of her was invasive and disrespectful.

These four understanding and insights come to us through committed individual inner work. Often, when we enter a love relationship, or any intimate relationship for that matter, we are not aware how we unconsciously invade the other person. And we are not aware how we expect to get our needs met from the other person. (Or we may think that “love” means that our partner should meet those needs.) The deeper the relationship goes, the more our wounds open and the more likely it becomes that we will get disturbed and become emotional. In our experience, deep and committed individual work on understanding how our wounds may sabotage our love relationships is absolutely essential for love to flower. That is why these four insights are prerequisites to flowing communication.

With these four insights in mind, we can present some specific tools to communicate consciously that we have found greatly helpful in our own relationship as well as with those we work with.

The purpose of conscious communication is to deepen the love and the connection between you. It is not to attack, punish, berate or prove to the other person that you are right.

Step 1. Become aware when you feel hurt, angry, and/or resentful or if your heart has closed to the other person. If you are pulling away from the other person, don’t let it pass, pretending that it doesn’t matter because the distance will only get bigger. Make a decision to communicate.

Step 2. If you feel hurt, angry or resentful, take some time to be with yourself. Time will often soften the charge. Feel that your connection with this person is important for you. Go inside and feel if you have been invasive or disrespectful in some way. Take some time to feel your hurt and see if you can put this hurt into words.

Step 3. Now, go to the other person and say that there is something important that you would like to express. Ash him or her if he or she has the space to listen. If not, ask him or her to tell you when would be a good time because it is important. If there is no willingness to communicate at all, seek help from a professional or friend. It is not okay not to make the effort to communicate because the relationship eventually will die.

Step 4. If there is a willingness to communicate, take ten minutes (precisely) to express yourself. You can begin by saying, “I felt hurt or upset when you…”(and be precise.) Make an effort to talk about your feelings from your heart without blaming, attacking or analyzing the other person. During those ten minutes, the other person simply listens. At any time, if you as the listener like it is too much, you can say, “Wait, I just need some time to take this in.”

Step 5. Once you have expressed your hurt, the listener, you can say from your heart, “I hear you and I understand.” Resist the temptation to defend yourself.

Step 6. Now the listener, you can take ten minutes to express yourself, following the same guidelines of the person who expressed himself or herself initially.

Step 7. The new listener, you respond by saying from your heart, “I hear you and I understand.”

It is not in our nature to live in conflict or in resentment. But when we don’t make a continual effort to stay connected and to communicate in a mature way as we have described, it is natural that hurt and distance grows. By following these simple steps, you are allowing the heart to take over again, the love to flow again and the relationship to keep deepening as it is meant to do.

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Dealing With Painful Emotions

Dealing with Painful Emotions
Krishnananda

I have felt that learning to deal with painful emotional states is one of the most important aspects of growth. It affects our love relationships and how we deal with the inevitable disappointments, losses and rejections that life brings. It also determines our ability to find ourselves and discover our depth as a human being. Many of us were raised in an environment where people did not have a healthy way to deal with their emotions. All too often, those who raised us ran away from their fear and pain into some sort of addictive behavior such as substance, sex or food abuse, working compulsively, becoming aggressive or hysterical, distracting themselves in one way or another or holding to rigid religious beliefs and morality. Today, we may find ourselves with a tendency to mimic these dysfunctional patterns or pick lovers and friends who do.

I would like to share a simple method for learning to deal with painful emotions. It has and continues to help me in these situations and it is also an important part of what Amana and I teach in our seminars. Basically, the healing is to get in touch with the pain and fear that we carry inside. That is what lies behind our painful emotional states. That may sound simplistic, but it’s true. And by “getting in touch”, I mean feeling it, understanding where it comes from and seeing how it shows itself in our body, in our behavior and in our thinking. And part of this exploration is also to see how we habitually run away from it – our compensations. When we are not choosing to feel our pain and fear, we will find some way of running away from it in the ways I mentioned above.

When I am triggered and feel rejected, inferior, inadequate, unnourished, stressed or unappreciated, I have had (and still do although less so) a habit of reacting in some way. We can react by: blaming, judging, complaining, or getting irritated, angry, moody, petulant, restless, depressed, listless, silent and withdrawn or spaced out, to mention a few. We each have our own favorite mix of these emotional states and behaviors. My favorites are spacing out, judging, competing to prove myself, getting angry or complaining. (But actually, as I look over the list, I can react with anyone of them.) It is human to react in these ways. After all, fear and pain is disturbing and who wants to be disturbed. So, we compulsively try to push away the fear or pain in some way.

But instead of stopping there, as most of us might do, we can go further. We can say to ourselves, “Okay, I am disturbed, let me just feel this.” A few tools can help. “Let me take a moment to feel how this feels in my body – perhaps I have contraction in my chest or solar plexus, perhaps my breathing is shallow, maybe I feel restless, confused or paralyzed.” “If I notice that I am angry, instead of compulsively acting out from the anger, let me see how this anger actually feels in my body.” “Let me feel the agitation, the tightness, the restlessness and my desire to strike out.” It helped me immensely when I started to look for these body sensations.

Another tool is just to notice how we normally react when we are disturbed and say to ourselves, “Ok, I am reacting this way because I am disturbed. Instead of judging myself for being disturbed and for reacting, I am going to observe this behavior in a nonjudgmental way.” “I am also going to notice how the disturbance affects how I think.” I have judged myself horribly for reacting and even for getting disturbed. My inner dialogue goes something like this, “You idiot, after all these years of working on yourself, and you still go into this stuff!” “You call yourself a meditator! What kind of meditation is this?” “You are impossible! How can you expect anyone to love you?” “Get it together, after all, you teach this stuff, remember?” When we have a point of view about what we should and should not be experiencing, it makes it very difficult to just be present to it. So it helps to become aware of what our attitude is. It is hard to accept and explore something that we judge and reject. When I am able to see my self-judgments and opinions, I can stand back from them a bit. I can even question if they are really true.

No matter how much we may have worked on ourselves or no matter how much time we have spent sitting on a meditation cushion, we are going to get disturbed in certain situations. Life has a way of bringing up whatever is still unsettled inside of us, whatever is still unhealed. And the more we open to life and to love, the more it surfaces – deep spaces of feeling unsafe, unloved or insecure. When we get disturbed, it has been triggered by something. When we take some time to examine the trigger, we learn a great deal about ourselves. The trigger can be:

• The way someone talks to us or treats us.
• Not getting the attention, love, recognition, approval or respect we would like.
• Feeling disrespected and feeling that we didn’t stand up for ourselves.
• Feeling like a failure or anticipating feeling like a failure.
• Being frightened or anticipating being afraid.
• Feeling that we are not fulfilled the expectations we have on ourselves.
• Feeling judged or expected upon by others.
• Feeling not content with our life or with our choice of friends or lover.
• Feeling unfulfilled in our work.
• Feeling that we are compromising in our life.

We get triggered when it opens a wound. If it is the wound of shame, the trigger can be some kind of failure, criticism, judgment or rejection. Or the trigger can open our wound of abandonment when we suffer a loss or feel unloved or uncared for. Our wound of not feeling safe and secure can easily be triggered by any situation or treatment from someone that makes us feel threatened.

It is helpful to become aware of our triggers. Each of us has definite trigger points – things that get us disturbed. And our triggers link directly (or sometimes indirectly) to traumas from invasions and abandonments we experienced as a child. When we are provoked today, it is because it echoes the way we were traumatized as a child. These are our patterns. For example, if we had a parent who was an alcoholic and not present, we get provoked today when someone close to us is not present. Or if we were disrespected in some way as a child, we will be highly sensitive to being disrespected today. We will actually attract these situations so that we can heal from them. As we become aware of our specific triggers and observe our patterns, it helps us to understand and to bring compassion to ourselves.

The traumas we experienced as a child had and still has a profound affect on our nervous system. It caused us to lose a basic trust in life and in love. It causes us to be reactive, defensive, withdrawn and irritable. It causes us to experience fear and even profound panic for seemingly no reason. Do we need to know the whole story of how we were traumatized as a child? No. But it is helpful to appreciate that our wounds and acting out come as a result of what we experienced long ago. Without this understanding, we easily judge ourselves.

When fear or pain comes up, it is helpful to know the wound that is being triggered. We call this, framing, in our work. Here’s an example. I am very, very, very attached to Amana. (In fact, I find it hard to imagine that anyone who is really in love with someone wouldn’t get as attached as I get. I see the world through my eyes.) And by attached, I mean that I get affected by all her feelings. I get frightened and anxious when we separate, at least in the beginning. I get disturbed when she gets sick or doesn’t feel well. I hate it when she gets mad at me. I feel horribly guilty when I get mad at her or when I am insensitive or even not available emotionally.

But there is something important that I also have learned. When we allow ourselves to get closer to someone, we get more and more attached, more and more affected by all those things I mentioned above. And the reason is the abandonment wound. The abandonment wound is the place of all our longing for companionship, safety, affection, love and warmth and the fear and pain of not having it or the fear or losing it. Until we create deep sustained intimacy in our life, it is hard to realize how much of this longing sits inside. But once we do have it, the fear of losing it becomes very strong. Being able to know that I am feeling these emotions because of the depth of the abandonment wound (framing) is so helpful for me not to judge and condemn myself.

Here’s another example. I am passionate about tennis. I like to think of myself as a pretty good player and I am very attached to how I play. But when I compete, I get nervous, and I fall apart. I can’t seem to settle my body and perform as well as I know I am capable of doing when I am relaxed. Now I know that what is happening to me in those moments of competition and pressure is called shock. It also used to happen to me whenever I took exams or even in sex (still does at times) whenever I felt or feel insecure. When we are in shock, the fear level is so high that our nervous system shuts down, everything gets tense, our breathing gets shallow and we become flustered. When we go into shock, our body does not function normally or as we would like it to. That is troublesome if we want to do our best. And shock cannot be remedied by will power - only by acceptance and gradual relaxation.

To use the method I am describing requires a willingness to contain uncomfortable feelings. And that’s a conscious choice, a conscious commitment and a clear insight that it is better to feel than to act out from the feeling. Acting out is what most of us do until we make this conscious choice. For sure, that’s what I did. But somewhere along the way, I could see that being reactive without going deeper, in the way I have described, was destructive. It was hurtful to those close to me and it re-enforced a childish self-image. Now when I act out, most of the time, I can feel the pain that it causes to others and myself.

I also discovered that I have the space inside to contain the feelings even when in the moment, it feels like I could die. We call that “allowing the burning.” Because often that’s just how it feels – like burning up inside with anger, frustration, impatience, pain and anxiety. Here’s something a bit esoteric that can help us contain those painful or frightening moments. We can open our palms and imagine that we are giving the pain or the fear up to existence (or to God). Rather than fighting with it, by opening the palms, we surrender to it. This is powerful and it helps immensely for the difficult experience to pass. But it will pass and when it passes, it leaves us feeling immensely empowered. It is nourishing to discover that we can hold pain and fear without throwing it on another or distracting ourselves with some addiction. It is also nourishing to notice that when we stop sabotaging our life in reaction, we invite our love and creativity to flourish. People respond to us differently because we are no longer pushing them away with our reactions. Or if we do react, we can apologize and heal the hurt we may have caused.

In a nutshell, here is the method:
1. Notice when you get disturbed.
2. Notice how you react (act out) from the disturbance.
3. Take some time to feel the disturbance in the body.
4. Notice how the disturbance affects how you think.
5. Notice any judgments you might have about being disturbed or reacting from the disturbance.
6. Notice your triggers – those things that provoke disturbance. (This is coming from your trauma of the past.)
7. Notice if there are patterns that keep repeating themselves in your life.
8. As you allow yourself to feel the fear and/or the pain, open your palms and give it up to existence.

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