Meditation
The Promise and Peril of Emotional Sensitivity
Why and how to remain whole while feeling the depth of life.
Posted May 22, 2019
How much should I let myself feel? How much of these feelings should I communicate to those around me?
These questions are so basic, they are written so finely into the machine language of our operating systems, that we might not even recognize the extent to which they govern our basic relationships to ourselves and to other people. Typically by adulthood these questions have been posed and answered entirely unconsciously, as by now we’ve been so profoundly shaped by all the familial and cultural messages that tell us exactly how deeply we should be feeling whatever we feel, and precisely to whom and to what degree we should be communicating these feelings. More specifically, by adulthood we learn that we should not be feeling certain emotions too intensely (say, sadness), too publicly (say, pride), or at all (say, anger, especially if you’re a woman). We learn what society expects of our emotional life, and we typically do our best to conform to those expectations, even within our private sense of ourselves.
Typically such expectations are squelching of our emotional life, largely because emotions can present problems for society, for ourselves, and for the people in our lives. Emotions make requests, even demands; they name some aspect of the truth; they name society’s problems; they call out other people’s blind spots; they induce emotions and the expression of those emotions in others; they ask for help, and help may not come, or it may come at too high a cost. In short, emotions bridge the boundaries between people, and what then crosses that bridge is unpredictable. The experience and communication of emotions is how we know each other, not in our constructed selves but in some space of realness. An emotional experience of life - and a skillful communication of these emotions - is an essential component of moving our society towards social health, and of living a life of connection with ourselves and with others.
For the vast majority of us it is this connection that makes life most worth living. Recently a patient asked me why she should share with me the deepest pains she has known, since in the telling she would no doubt be brought to very difficult emotions, and in response I “wouldn’t be able to do anything about it anyway.” I responded that of course this was true: I wouldn’t be able to take away her pain, and I would never try to, since her pain was the only possible and healthy response to the events that induced it. I asked her if there was a difference between experiencing her pain alone, unseen, in isolation, and experiencing it in the presence of another person who could receive her with understanding, with compassion - another person with his own pain, albeit of a different kind, that allowed for this understanding and compassion to be genuinely felt. We agreed that of course there was a difference, that the difference was the difference between loneliness and a kind of love, and that the kinds of love we might experience amounted to what made life meaningful.
So to experience emotions and share them skillfully (that is, to the right people at the right time in an effective way) is essential if life is to be worth it. And yet so many of us have learned to suppress our emotional life. I’ve found that much of this drive to suppress is rooted in a conflation of two very different aspects of emotionality: sensitivity and fragility.
Sensitivity is the phenomenon of feeling things deeply and easily. Think of a seismograph: if the sensitivity is turned up on the instrument, it picks up smaller vibrations from further away. The needle is moved by its environment; it’s more finely connected to its ecosystem, to the point where boundaries between the needle and the waves that move it are blurred. Emotional sensitivity operates in much the same way, and to feel the vibrations of the world can be an enormously powerful gift. It allows for a keener sense of what’s happening; it makes for a richer experience of life’s waves; it can orient us towards the truth - for us, for other people, between us all. In this sense it can be the basis for not only meaning, but power as well, since knowledge is power.
If sensitivity is the capacity to feel deeply, fragility on the other hand is the phenomenon of needing to feel certain things and not others. It’s an incapacity to hold up in the face of the unpleasant patterns of the needle. It’s an inability to recover from the experience of deep emotion, to regain a center, to maintain one’s capacity to function with maturity even in the presence of something very painful. This can be an enormous problem; without the capacity to tolerate our more painful feelings, we might find ourselves terrified to go towards certain spaces of life, or worse, we might be unable to bear the feelings that we carry within us at all times. This leads to a range of problems, from the anxious position that perpetually fights off life, to the depressive position that has formed a kind of dissociative crouch from it, to a host of difficult personality structures we all encounter with regularity in the world: the bragger, the complainer, the perpetual victim, the chronic abuser, etc.
We need healthy connection with each other. We need this desperately, perhaps more than at any time in our history. Our society, our ecology, hangs in the balance. The healthy connections we need requires us to do the work of cultivating our emotional maturity. This maturity involves the work of allowing sensitivity to our environments, to each other, celebrating it, teaching it, while also cultivating the capacity to keep our shape as we experience what emerges when we allow ourselves to feel the truth of life.
How do we cultivate this capacity to feel life deeply while also learning to keep our shape? There are I suppose many methods, but I will offer the two that are essential for me in my own efforts: the holding space of loving relationship, and meditation.
By loving relationship, I mean love in a broad sense, the love that emerges between fellow travelers in a moment of recognition of that co-traveling. This is the love of compassion. It can emerge between lovers, between friends, between strangers in a city that has experienced something terrible. It can also emerge in a particular kind of way in therapy. The emotions deeply felt and expressed in good therapy are likely met with a genuine kind of love by the therapist: It’s okay. This is life. I know. And (most powerfully, though this typically isn’t explicitly named), me too. The laying bare of that which had been unnamed, unnameable, unmet, in the context of a loving space is often a powerful step in holding one’s own deepest vulnerabilities as a good parent holds a distraught child. If we feel we are being held in our pain, over time we learn quite naturally to hold ourselves. To hold our pain, even perhaps our despair, with compassion, with dignity, is to cultivate the opposite of fragility.
Meditation is the most useful solo practice I know of to cultivate both self-knowledge and a robustness in the face of our experienced truth. Many volumes have by now been written about the benefits of meditation, and there are many different ways to do it, so I will only say here that I can think of no other practice that more effectively develops the capacity to maintain a center in the midst of a human life’s turbulence. I work with many people who have “tried” meditation and found it unhelpful. I can say with nearly complete confidence that these people simply were not truly meditating, or not truly meditating for long enough. For to truly meditate over time as a consistent practice is practically guaranteed to be helpful in a variety of hugely important ways. In short, much like a loving, mature relationship with another person we trust, a skillful meditation practice leads us naturally to develop a capacity to both experience ourselves clearly and to hold what we experience with dignity.
Given the enormous political and social turmoil of our time, and the environmental degradation we continue to unleash upon our home, many people with good reason despair about the direction of our movement as a people. And yet here is one way in which I believe we continue to grow enormously. When I was a child in a New Jersey public school in the 80s, “social/emotional learning” meant learning how to dodge being the one bullied and shamed. Today my children learn what emotions are, their place in an ecosystem, and how to honor the inner lives of those around them. This is progress of the highest order.
I hope this movement in our education pays dividends once our children are running the world. For now, we adults must learn for ourselves what likely wasn’t taught to us: that our inner lives are by definition complex, that to know a piece of what is true we must be connected to our inner experience, and that for our life to have meaning we must allow ourselves to be moved by it.
