The best way to do that is to cultivate the ability to remain calm even when deeply emotional.
By all means cry, quake or ball your fists. Just remain centered. With it. Present. Not engaging in flights of fancy or anxious behaviours.
Mantras and vipassana help w/this.
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I'm still finding that I occasionally shift without noticing, leading to some kind of mess in my life.
It's difficult working out how to live when your fixed personality is no longer quite so fixed, but you have to get comfortable with that ambiguity.
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Great thread, thank you!
My experience aligns with what you said. Thankfully, I have not had an explosive release.
It was more like: "I have finally experienced the emotion that I tried to avoid years (decades) ago".
And now I can face those situations in a more healthy way.
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Yes, that's the best-case outcome for specific conditioning ("it's OK to be sad about this, actually!")
At some point the process itself becomes self-reinforcing and you just keep shedding stuff in perpetuity.
If you do what I do, anyway. Different methods, different outcomes.
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Learning how to deal with things just disappearing on the fly is surprisingly tricky.
Lots of behaviour tied up in specific emotional conditioning. Lots of other things in your life tied up in those behaviours!
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Good on you to tackle that conditioning well!
My first big release looked like just getting irrationally angry all the time. For months. Not fun.
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Interesting, now that you mention it, I've had irrational anger and anxiety for a few weeks as a build-up to the actual release.
I think what helped was that I was trying to stack up positive habits on top of the emotional trauma, not realizing the trauma was there.
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And once the trauma was released, I felt this immense freedom!
And all the positive habits I was trying to install now suddenly clicked in place.
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Pays to mention I was using bad technique. Emotional processing without a stable concentration practice. No mantras or anything.
You hit the trauma stuff and it's overwhelming, retraumatizing. Just like a lot of misapplied therapy can end up being.
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Ah right, I'm going through concentration practice before I have the guts to tackle vipassana. 😁
The releases mostly came when I hit a plateau with concentration and got a recommendation (from a teacher) to explore mental content that comes up when I try to concentrate.
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Interesting long-term approach!
I do concentration (mantras), vipassana (or something similar) and emotional processing in tiny, rotating cycles. All in one sitting.
I'd just let my practice sort of go at that point, but kept on digging around my emotions. Hilarity ensued...
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When you say emotional processing, do you mean metta (loving-kindness) or something else?
I'm following The Mind Illuminated (TMI) approach by Culadasa:
amazon.co.uk/dp/B01LWVW6KP/
It's a practice that has 10 stages of mostly concentration + some vipassana in the later stages.
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It has an active Reddit community and combines classical Buddhist meditation practices with neuroscience.
The purpose of doing shamatha (concentration) before vipassana is to reduce the possibility of a turbulent "Dark Night of the Soul" once you start doing insight practices.
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