Guilt, Fear, and the Freedom to Feel
Culpa, miedo y la libertad de sentir
A student describes a strong resistance to allowing pleasure, and the teacher traces this resistance through guilt and time pressure to an underlying fear, exploring how freedom arises from seeing these dynamics clearly.
Guilt, Fear, and the Freedom to Feel
A student describes a strong resistance to allowing pleasure, and the teacher traces this resistance through guilt and time pressure to an underlying fear, exploring how freedom arises from seeing these dynamics clearly.
There's a resistance around thoughts and feelings. A thought comes up that says, "I can't go to that." It's really resistant because there's too much pleasure, and I'll stay there forever and won't want to leave. That's the thought I have.
A masochistic thought about pleasure.
Yeah, it's really strong, though.
What is the nature of emotion? What would you say?
Guilt is the first thing that comes to mind.
The invocation of time
You invoked time. And what is that?
It's a pressure of having to accomplish things, to do things, to live a life in the world.
You refer to guilt as the first thought of the emotion. What is guilt in service to? Let me put it this way. Let's assume, as an experiment, that you are creating the guilt, manifesting it, invoking it fully and freely out of your own choice. Why would you do that? What is it in service to? What is it helping you gain?
Maybe it's helping me be seen as a good person, to be doing the right thing, living as I should be living.
And if you flip that around, maybe it's helping you avoid what?
Helping me avoid what I want to be doing.
Let's think of the world of feeling or emotion. It's helping you avoid what emotion?
It's helping me avoid joy.
Why would you avoid joy?
Something about worth and deserving it.
Guilt as a mask for fear
Let's go back to your invocation of time. What could happen if you do go toward what you're thinking about? What could happen that you want to avoid?
Do you mean as in a feeling, or just in general?
Whatever comes as an answer, because it's the same thing. It's going to be an emotion that comes first, or a narrative that carries an emotion. It will be emotion-based.
When you invoke time, and specifically the future, you bring it here. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. It's remarkable to be able to relate to time and talk about it. But it's important to see what's happening: you brought up guilt, and then you brought up the future. And I'm finding it interesting that in my questioning, that which was clear very immediately in the first moment has been eluded, which is fear. So what are you afraid of?
Afraid of stopping. Afraid of getting it wrong. Of getting lost, maybe.
And how is your experience now, contemplating and exploring that?
It feels like there's more there. Like that's a rope that leads to something further. It's not just stopping. There's something behind that. A fear of loss just came up.
Pulling on the rope
Yes. By relating more directly to the fear, right now you're getting bubbles and glimpses of narratives, situations, and experiences. You can keep pulling on that rope and experiencing what's deeper, what's behind it, what's after it. Things can become more energetic in that you could start to experience something beyond just images and narratives. It can become more embodied, and it can shift and move.
For example, you were talking about guilt. Guilt is something we invoke, something we produce as a way to control ourselves. It's a way to invoke a kind of moral sense of "I'm doing the right thing," when in fact it's "I'm controlling myself because I'm afraid." It's not that whenever I feel a sense of guilt about doing something, now that I realize it's guilt, I must always do that thing. No. But it's important to know that this is the dynamic at play.
Freedom beyond reactivity
There is no free choice otherwise. If I am habitually invoking guilt because I am in fear, I will always choose left. There's no freedom in that. If I always act when I feel a sense of guilt, then I rebel against myself and do the opposite. There's still no free choice. It's a reactivity to guilt or fear. If I always do the thing I'm afraid of because my way to cope is to react and take risks, then there's no freedom either.
Freedom comes from seeing all of it and then choosing, not based on anything as a rule. It's that now I see everything. What do I want right now, which is different from the next moment? And actually, the choosing happens naturally. There's a flow of the universe that will choose through us. But if we are not seeing things as they are, our choices will be limited, will create some form of struggle or difficulty. The deeper we are able to see things as they are, the more the choosing will come from a deeper place, one that is more aligned.
Pain, surrender, and what dies
This doesn't mean things won't hurt. It means I will move more freely in the direction of what my deepest nature wants. And what can happen is that the true, real pain that comes from that will be okay.
To me, this is the deepest teaching of Christ. Not just his life, but the symbol of the crucifixion: the absolute freedom and openness, the surrendering into the crucifixion by choice, even if it's just a symbol and metaphor. The resurrection, in which something can come out the other side, and that something is our being. Something dies, which is our illusion, our identification.
As humans, we have this constant inner battle between choosing to flow deeply with what the deepest part of us, the deepest calling of the universe through us, wants, or resisting that to a degree sufficient to preserve an idea of what we are. When I do this, I suffer. When I let go into life, there's fear and pain. It's this tension that is the spiritual process.
And there is something that can happen, a liberation, where that ability to contract into a belief in something limited simply ends. This is not the ending of pain. It is the ending of resisting life, to a very great degree.
The compass points toward fear
The direction is: What do you want? What does the universe want through you? What is your deepest longing, your deepest desire? And then observe, and be as clear as you can, that it's not coming from, or in service to, separation and limitation. If it's toward fear, more likely that's the way.
What do you mean, "if it's toward fear, that's the way"?
I say "more likely" because, for instance, it would be scary to walk in front of traffic. But if it's clearly what the universe wants through me, I don't think it's going to be walking in front of traffic.
Let me give you an example from my own life. At one point, what I really wanted was to end the contract of my work and go into a master's degree. That was absolutely terrifying. For me, that was one of the moments of moving into a deeper way of being, but it was toward fear. It was terrifying for reasons that at the time seemed financial, but that was a superficial fear. The deeper fear was to live more authentically, to live in a way that was more unknown: less knowing of what life would be like, less knowing of how I would be, less knowing of how others would think and respond to me.
My teacher would always say the compass, the true North, is where fear is.
What do you really want?
One way to answer the question "What's the meaning of life?" is to do whatever you want to do, always, at every moment. But that's deceptively simple. Because what do you want? Where is that want coming from? Is it really what you want, or is it an illusion, a belief?
And so that's where the work of knowing yourself comes in, which is actually to know what you are not. The more you see, "Oh, that's not me, that's not me," then everything these narratives support no longer has its energy. The desires coming from that which I thought I was dissipate, dissolve, and the true, real want can come forth.
And that's with the feelings, looking at those feelings? That helps with this?
Feeling them. The main mechanism of illusion is to avoid feeling. So in a sense, the antidote, the way to deactivate it, is simply to go into the feeling. The feeling that all of the thinking is trying to help you not feel: just feel it. And then all the power of the pull of the narrative, all the resistance, you see that it was all there in service to not feeling.