The Comfort of Familiar Suffering
El Consuelo del Sufrimiento Familiar
A question about how to identify one's habitual emotional patterns, and the teacher's explanation of how repetitive emotional states function as a coping mechanism we unknowingly create.
The Comfort of Familiar Suffering
A question about how to identify one's habitual emotional patterns, and the teacher's explanation of how repetitive emotional states function as a coping mechanism we unknowingly create.
Do I have to figure this out with my head, or can I just see it when I meditate? In those moments when you go beyond thoughts, whatever emotions come up, is that the way to tell the difference and find out what my tamed and untamed emotions are?
I'd say the best way is to notice what you're comfortable with.
The pattern of victimhood
At first, the way the mind would work and create this pattern is that it would appear as something happening to us, something we're a victim of in the sense that we are on the receiving end. It's like, "Here I am again. Life is doing this to me." There's a sense of "it's happening to me, and there is no power in me to do anything with this." It's just happening.
It will take some form of feeling and a narrative that specifically speaks to the feeling aspect that we don't like. But the key is that it's repetitive. It's like, "Here I am again. This is happening to me again." And that is the tamed emotion.
Recognizing our own creation
The first thing is to realize that we are creating that. We are the agents of it. By seeing through that self-hypnotic spell, we crack the shell of our self-involvement. Because this is something we learned to do as children in order to cope with whatever was happening. We create an emotional state and a repetitive narrative that feels comfy and cozy in a sense, even though we don't like it, because it's better than the terrifying, painful thing that's actually happening.
It's like lying to ourselves.