i have a lot of resistance to metta / loving-kindness practices, or any kind of deliberate cultivation of positive emotion, and i think a lot of it has to do with feeling like as a kid i was constantly pressured into pretending i was happier and more satisfied than i was
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the practices i've been drawn to instead, like circling or bio-emotive, have felt so tremendously relieving by contrast because they create space for me to express all the unhappiness and dissatisfaction i've been storing up over a lifetime
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focusing on negative emotions does start to feel unbalanced after awhile though. so i've also been taking more opportunities to notice what i like, what i love, what excites me - stuff that's already there but that i haven't historically focused on
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there's a tension here between something like acknowledging and accepting what's already True vs. taking deliberate action to create new Truth that i don't know what to do with yet
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the good news is that the positive and negative emotions aren't very separate anyway. a lot of what comes up for me is grief and where there's grief there's something that was loved, and i can notice and express that love too
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yes! big agree.
I was once part of a group exercise where, in pairs, we had to repeat to each other:
"you are enough."
"I know."
every other person really, genuinely *was* enough; but it still felt dumb because I so lacked the freedom to say they weren't.
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similarly I once met a guy who got into circling because the few circled he'd been a part of were all very positive and cuddly-loving... then the moment he got into a circle where people were actually feeling negatively abt things, incl. abt him, he got hit very hard by this 😬
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while it is good to cathart and express negative emotions, i find that doing so in the precence of others merely pushes them onto others, no matter to how small a degree. this is why to purify negatives monks are usually instructed to go into a forest and yell with no-one around
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:O
woah...
that does seem kinda likely... unless the "others" are very aware themselves and have the ability to transmute whatever you're expressing, via deep compassion/presence/awareness so it just becomes love or understanding
which not everyone can do but some def can???
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