I feel sadness, anger and other emotions with far deeper intensity and more often than I remember doing before, but I'm almost never scared.
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Even in situations we might think of as intrinsically frightening are not quite frightening when you recognize your feelings as they appear.
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This has put me in a strange bubble where I am shocked people *don't* react to certain things, and perplexed when they react to others.
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Much of what we would describe as "genuine" emotion is fear of a situation triggering unwanted behaviour; fear you'll lose control.
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And much of what is described as overreaction, childishness or "weird" is really how you actually feel.
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The thing is: it's not a dichotomy. You don't need to either react to emotions or suppress them; society just doesn't know what else to do.
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When you start deeply feeling your feelings, deeply feeling your pain, it comes about that it usually has a very salient cause.
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In some cases, the cause can be dealth with. In other cases, the pain can only be accepted or rejected. Rejection makes it worse, so...
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... in genuine acceptance of what's going on, things either dissolve utterly or come to a sort of stillness. "There is pain. OK, fine."
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Coming to this sort of calm integration, however, takes time. Emotions produce implicit responses, and you don't really *control* them.
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So the chaos, the lack of stability, the sense of losing control, the utter bewilderment as you cry or shout or do something unexpected...
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... is all a normal side-effect of meditating a lot if you have severe distortions in your psychosomatic awareness. Which you do, 99.999%.
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Oh and it's not just about emotions, either. Coping with an issue like, say, chronic back pain or bad balance, also seems to cause trouble.
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So while they don't tell you "some therapy may be required", it's a common enough result. We can't solve everything by ourselves.
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