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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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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those are the interesting ones! but yeah i can see people running into this for sure. i think it's a mistake to sell circling as being fundamentally about connection; to me circling is fundamentally about truth, and sometimes the truth is people shouldn't be connected
the circles where people expressed intensely negative things lit me up and made me feel relaxed! i was like "holy shit finally no more bullshit, everything i'm sensing in the room can just be spoken aloud, incredible"
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Fuck yeah. I love this too. Seeing people's raw anger, frustration, sadness. It can be cleansing and freeing in some way for those around them.
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