Tamed and Untamed Emotions
Emociones domesticadas y no domesticadas
The teacher explores the distinction between "tamed" emotions, the habitual states we unconsciously create and are addicted to, and "untamed" emotions, the deeper feelings that threaten our sense of self and that we spend enormous energy avoiding.
Tamed and Untamed Emotions
The teacher explores the distinction between "tamed" emotions, the habitual states we unconsciously create and are addicted to, and "untamed" emotions, the deeper feelings that threaten our sense of self and that we spend enormous energy avoiding.
I consider emotions to be a type of thought, a form of thought, because you can distinguish feeling from emotion. You don't need thought for feeling. This is just a way of defining things; there might be other ways to use these words. But we can experience at the level of feeling without thought. I call that feeling.
When there is what we might call, say, shame, you cannot experience shame without thought. It is a form of thought. There has to be a narrative, an "I" at the center of a narrative, for there to be an experience of shame.
The spectrum of emotion
There are different kinds of emotions, many kinds. I call them all fear and pain. Shame is a form of pain. Anxiety is a form of fear. Some of these we have had a really hard time experiencing. And ultimately, the hardest thing for us to experience is feeling, deep feeling: sadness, grief, joy. For those you don't need thought. In fact, thought would obscure them.
What makes an emotion "tamed"
Tamed emotions are the emotions we are addicted to. They are what we tend to create with our habitual thinking. They will often be very uncomfortable. Shame, for example, is a very uncomfortable emotion. But depending on the person, I might be very comfortable experiencing shame, even though it is uncomfortable. It is tamed. I may hate it, but if I'm experiencing it regularly, it is a tamed emotion.
If I'm a frustrated person, depressed, angry, and so on, there are emotions I'm comfortable with. By "comfortable" I mean your sense of self is not threatened. We usually experience these emotions regularly. It's a familiar thing: "Here we go again, I'm frustrated," or "I'm feeling bad," a kind of blueness, a depressiveness. Feeling blue or anguish is not the same as sadness or grief. You can tell the difference by whether there is a lot of narrative going on.
What makes an emotion "untamed"
Untamed emotions are emotions we feel threatened by. There is a sense of self that feels threatened. And it depends on the person, on how the psyche developed. For some people, anger might be an untamed emotion. It is really hard for them to feel and express anger. For the next person, anger could be a tamed emotion, and they are in it all the time. Same with shame.
Untamed emotions are, in a sense, what we need to learn to feel in order to grow. We have mechanisms of defense, or, in a more spiritual sense, mechanisms of illusion: ways we create a distorted picture of what reality is. Reality might contain something very sad, but I can't feel sadness, and deep sadness could be very powerful. Or there could be a terror that is beyond thought, not an emotional terror but something deeper. What we do is create tamed emotions, a narrative that helps us bypass the untamed and keeps us distracted from it.
The habitual narratives we build
For example, there is a certain kind of anxiety, confusion, not knowing, not understanding. For some people, that is really hard to be with. So we create habitual narratives that produce a state of knowing, a sense of "things are okay, I understand what's going on, I know what I need to do."
But for the next person it might be the opposite. Some people are very comfortable in a constant state of drama. Those people often become actors or therapists. It becomes the familiar territory they can enter, understand, learn how it works, and play with.
For someone else, it is really uncomfortable to be sad or to be in any kind of negative emotional state. So they constantly create optimism: "Everything's okay." They avoid anything dramatic. Anyone who is dramatic, they see as problematic: "There's something wrong with them, they don't get it, they're ruining their lives." But for that person, the drama lives in the shadow.
Optimism and emotionality can both be avoidance
A person who is always optimistic (and I'm generalizing) who feels a kind of habitual okayness that isn't real or deep, that is not necessarily a good thing. And vice versa: feeling a lot of emotional movement, a kind of excessive emotionality, does not necessarily mean one is going deep and feeling a lot. It could be a form of avoiding a deeper grief or fear.
To wrap it up: the difference between tamed and untamed is what we are comfortable with, which reinforces our sense of self (we have learned to be comfortable there), versus what we are not comfortable with. This is what we learned in the environment we grew up in. It is, in a sense, handed down by our caregivers, our parents, our society. If one of our parents cannot handle their child being angry, and it is very difficult to be angry as a child, then anger is most likely going to be an untamed emotion for that child. Maybe not; there is no guarantee of how it will work for any particular person.
So I don't have to figure this out with my head? I can just see when I meditate, and when there are these moments of going beyond thought, whatever emotions come there, that's the way to find out what my untamed and tamed emotions are?
I would say the best way is to notice what you are comfortable with. At first, the way the mind would work and create this is that it would appear as something happening to us, as though we are a victim of it, on the receiving end. There is this sense of "it's happening to me" and "there is no power in me to do anything about it."
It will be some form of feeling and a narrative. But specifically regarding the feeling aspect: we don't like it, yet the key is that it is repetitive. "Here I am again. This is happening to me again." That is the tamed.
Seeing through the spell
The first thing is to realize we are creating that. We are the agents of it. By seeing through that self-hypnotic spell, we crack the shell of our self-involvement. This is something we learned to do as a child in order to cope with whatever was happening. We create an emotional state and a repetitive narrative that feels comfy and cozy in a sense, even though we don't like it, because it is better than the terrifying, painful thing that is actually happening.
It's like lying to ourselves.
I would say it is almost even necessary. It is a way to cope. It is just how the mind works. It is a young mind in an unknown universe with these giant beings who are completely deciding what our life is, which is our parents, literally. That is frightening. Our entire life is dictated by these gigantic beings. We are at complete mercy regarding our livelihood and well-being. So the mind offers a way to cope: no matter what is happening, at least you have this set of emotional states that you can cover it all up with and be okay.
Mostly these states are dark, painful, difficult, uncomfortable. But maybe they are not. Maybe the personality finds a way to create an optimism. And then that optimism will be the shell that needs to be broken for the terror and the despair to be experienced, for the reality of what is actually being felt.
How the untamed reveals itself
To generalize: just notice what seems to happen to you at the emotional level that has a "here we go again," habitual quality. That is going to be tamed. The untamed will reveal itself in its own time. As you see through the tamed, you don't have to look for the untamed. It will reveal itself when you see the tamed and recognize its self-hypnotic nature. When you see, "Ah, I'm actually choosing this. There's something I like about it. There's a little addictive quality around this." That is the moment of "I've been doing this all along." And yes, since you were three years old.
That is where it is important to be gentle and caring and to understand that it was needed. It was a way to manage. But if you are seeing through it, if you are questioning it, it seems like it is about time for growing out of it.
What lies beneath can be good
As we grow out of it, something will arise that does not feel very comfortable, and it might actually be joy or excitement. It could be something extremely good and life-affirming that we are terrified by, something we actually cover with anxiety and fear because fear is tamed. "I'm nervous, I'm worried, I'm stressed." This is familiar territory. And then it turns out it was actually joy. It was an expansiveness, an aliveness, a beauty.
And vice versa. When deep grief was presenting itself, for me there was a self-involved kind of blueness, a depressiveness that I was very good at creating. Until I saw through that, and then the grief started to break through. It was grief where I basically lost complete control: life as a river flowing, the body shaking, the body grieving, no thoughts, just absolute unexplainable grief. The same with terror. I remember sitting every morning, and my body would just shake in terror. I would close my eyes and I didn't know what I was afraid of. It was just terror flowing through me. And then in the afternoon, grief.
When the narrative becomes an afterthought
That is when you can tell: if the narrative starts to become an afterthought and there is just a flow, if the body is activated and something is moving through you and you feel it, you are starting to go into the deeper feeling, the untamed. But you don't control that. What you can do is see through the addiction to the tamed and to the thoughts. Then that other process happens. The river just takes over.
Sometimes it could be really gentle, but deep. Really quiet, but deep.
There are some things we talked about. What's normal to me is feeling small, in this victim thing, very insecure. And sometimes I wonder if that is also my comfort.
A hundred percent. Yes.
There is a very powerful and angry side in me, and it scares me a lot when it comes up.
The delicacy beneath the smallness
That smallness, that insecurity, could have an aspect that is real in the sense that the one seeing it would be seen as a vulnerability. There is a preciousness to it, a delicacy. But it is so vulnerable that we wrap it into smallness with a narrative of "not good enough." In a sense, it is somehow related, it fits, but it is a complete distortion of what it actually is. That narrative is self-involved, self-created, self-hypnotic.
Because you are mentioning it, you are already seeing it, and I am just confirming: very, very likely that is what it is. As you discover this and can express it, things will start to shake up and good things will happen.
But it is scary, I understand. It is scary because that is where you know yourself to be, and it is ending. It must end. You cannot sustain it much longer because it requires so much energy and creates so much friction with everything.
It feels new. And unsafe.
What I can say is that true safety is fearward. It is towards what feels unsafe when you are in a false safety, when we are in a safety that is conditional on our state, our story, and our emotions being a certain way. That safety is not very safe because it is conditional and transitory. It is always under threat. I need to keep an emotional and mental state arranged in a certain way for safety to be experienced.
True safety is not conditional. It does not depend on situations, context, states, thoughts, or emotions. But in the transition, if we want to discover true safety, we must go fearward, towards what feels unsafe.
The door into reality
If my words aren't inspiring enough, you can look at stories and myths. They all point to this. One example is The Truman Show. It is exactly about that. Where the movie ends, he is at the door, and he says, "Okay, I'm going through." That door is perfect because it really shows the complete unknown. But it is reality. He has crossed his biggest fear in order to get the opportunity to cross the door, and at the door, the biggest temptation to go back appears: his father's voice saying, "You're safe here."
Thank you.
Thank you for sharing. Very lovely.