The Tamed and the Untamed
Lo domesticado y lo indomable
A reflection on how the mind develops familiar emotional patterns as a survival strategy, and how seeing through these patterns allows deeper, uncontrolled feeling to emerge.
The Tamed and the Untamed
A reflection on how the mind develops familiar emotional patterns as a survival strategy, and how seeing through these patterns allows deeper, uncontrolled feeling to emerge.
It's a way to cope. It's necessary. It's just how the mind works. It's a young mind in an unknown universe with these giant beings who are completely deciding what our life is. Gigantic beings, our parents, literally. It's pretty frightening. Our entire life is dictated by these gigantic beings. We are at complete mercy of them for our livelihood and our well-being.
And so the mind offers a way to manage. No matter what's happening, at least you have this set of emotional states that you can cover it all up in and be okay with. Even if those states, as they mostly are, turn out to be dark, painful, difficult, uncomfortable. All kinds. And maybe they're not dark at all. Maybe the personality finds a way to create an optimism. And then that optimism will be the shell that needs to be broken for the terror and the despair to be experienced, for the reality of what is actually being felt to come through.
Noticing the habitual pattern
To generalize, I would say: just notice that which seems to happen to you at the emotional level that feels like "here we go again." That habitual, familiar territory. That's the tamed. And the untamed will reveal itself in its own time. As we see through the tamed, you don't have to look for the untamed. It will reveal itself when you see the tamed and you see the self-hypnotic nature of it. When you see, "Ah, I'm actually choosing this. There's something I like about it. There's a little addictive quality around this." That recognition is like, "I've been doing this all along." Yes, since you were three years old.
And that's where it's important to be gentle and caring and understanding that it was needed. It was a way to manage. But if you're seeing through it, if you're questioning it, it seems like it's about time for growing out of it.
When joy disguises itself as fear
As we grow out of it, we encounter something unfamiliar and think, "This doesn't feel very comfortable." And maybe it's actually joy or excitement. It could be something extremely good and life-affirming that we are terrified by, something we actually cover over with anxiety. I've seen this happen, in myself and in others, where we cover this expansive, joyful, beautiful thing with anxiety and fear, because the fear is familiar. So it's like, "I'm nervous, I'm worried, I'm stressed." That's how it used to be for me. And then it was actually joy. It was actually an expansiveness, an aliveness, a beauty.
When grief breaks through
And vice versa. When deep grief was presenting itself, there was a self-involved blueness, a depressiveness, that I was very good at creating. Until I saw through it. And the grief started to break through. It was grief where I basically lost complete control, in the sense of life and the river flowing, the body shaking, the body grieving. No thoughts. Just absolute, unexplainable grief.
And the same with terror. I remember sitting every morning, and then my body would just shake in terror. I would close my eyes and I didn't know what I was afraid of. It was just terror flowing routinely. And then the afternoon, grief.
The river takes over
That's when you can tell: the narrative starts to become an afterthought and there's just a flow. If the body is activated and something is moving through you and you can feel it, that's when you're starting to go into the deeper feeling, into the untamed. But you don't control that. What you can do is see through the addiction to the tamed, see through the thoughts. Then that other process happens on its own. The river just takes over.