The Belief Beneath the Storm
La creencia bajo la tormenta
A student describes being overwhelmed by intense emotional energy and asks how to work with it. The teacher traces this energy back to deeply held beliefs and unprocessed childhood experiences, distinguishing between surface emotions and the deeper feelings they mask.
The Belief Beneath the Storm
A student describes being overwhelmed by intense emotional energy and asks how to work with it. The teacher traces this energy back to deeply held beliefs and unprocessed childhood experiences, distinguishing between surface emotions and the deeper feelings they mask.
My path is through the heart, and I feel everything a bit too intensely. It can become very overwhelming. I get filled with all this energy from whatever experience is present, and it's hard to process when it's coming at me with such porosity, from every angle, from every thought. It's a different route, but it is the route I have to take. I'm just wondering what you would say about that.
What you describe, I relate to. I might be misinterpreting, but I'll frame it like this: there can be a very deeply heart-centered quality, and then a very powerful and active mind that is complex, stormy, operating on multiple levels. Then there's a polarity, a conflict, not only within the mind but between a deeper heart-centered sense and the mind. It can feel like a lot of energy to deal with all at once.
Yes. My body is filled with all of that energy, and it's like: what do I do with all of this?
The mind-body loop
As those thoughts are entertained, as attention is paid to the narratives the mind produces, they generate triggers that affect biology. There will be releases of chemistry in the body. There is a whole mind-body dynamic at work.
I've gone through years of process with this kind of thing, partly through awakening and partly through trauma work. It's a combination of many things. But if I were to say it more simply: the culprit is to see, ultimately, that all of those thoughts are neither true nor real.
Maybe I need some of that easygoingness about it.
It's not as though you can switch to being easygoing. But there is a deep understanding available: that every single thought, one hundred percent of them, is not true or real.
What that can bring is this: everything that is the storm in the mind gets projected onto the system of your life. What's happening over there, what's happening with this person, this group, this job, the future, the past. To some degree all of that is projected onto the world, the space of what your life is, and it appears to be accurately true and real. And it's constantly being updated: "Well, that's not really what's happening, but this is really what's happening. That's not really what I need to do, but this is what I need to do." There's always this conceptual overlay.
Now, the projection of mental narrative onto life not only propagates it and keeps it going, but makes it distressing. And it starts from assuming that at least some of those thoughts, interpretations, and beliefs are true and real.
Assuming they are true and real, yes. To a certain degree.
What counts as factual
If I were to ask you now what the biggest challenge in your life is, you would tell me something. And I could say the same. I could tell you something that's the biggest challenge I'm going through. To the degree that it is assumed to be factual, it will be difficult.
But is it to the degree that I'm denying it's factual?
It's to the degree that you are believing that your version of your thinking is factual.
I think it's a bit complex. The challenge is factual, let's say that. But my relationship to it, my thought about it, is not. Is that what you're saying?
If you say the challenge is factual, that's where we can dive in, because very few things are factual. With the exception of a few things we can assume are factual at the level of thought (for example, "the Earth moves around the Sun" is a more accurate map than "the Sun goes around the Earth"), most other narratives about life are just interpretations.
The most factual aspect, for me, is the energetic component of it. The body.
Energy as consequence, not evidence
That's an illusion. It's not factual. If you believe there is, say, a killer bear about to break through the door and eat you, your body is going to be in panic. You're going to feel the energetics of terror: cortisol spiking, fight-or-flight mode, a full trauma response. All that needs to happen is that you believe the narrative, and this will happen in what you call your energy. You can imagine infinite stories that, if believed, will produce the same response.
So is the energy of it true and factual? The energy is present, yes. But the energy is a consequence of an illusion. All it does is serve as a self-fulfilling confirmation of the narrative. If I feel the bear is going to break through and I start to panic and I feel my body in panic, it's as if the panic must be evidence that what I believe is actually happening. And then it starts to loop.
But that energy needs a place to go to.
Not really. That's an assumption. As soon as you stop believing the false narrative, your body is going to process the chemistry and settle organically, naturally, on its own. It is all in the mind. It is all in the beliefs. It is all in what you choose to believe.
Now, there are situations where the mind's interpretation is warranted. For example, I might be in a situation where somebody who wants to harm me might be on the other side of a door. I have a clear understanding that this is possible, and I might feel quite confident in my interpretation. I might feel some emotional reaction, some fear. I need to assess that, work with it, decide how to respond. But in that situation, if I am not believing false narratives, I will be responding to reality in the most accurate way. And that only happens if I know that all of my interpretations are interpretations. I know they are just possibilities, and I assess to what degree they're possible. I discard the ones that are most likely false and address the ones that are more likely true. For example, crossing the road and seeing a big truck coming: I assess that if I step in front of it, there's danger. That's an accurate response.
This way of perceiving and evaluating is always happening for me. But it doesn't answer the question about the subtle dimension. I once heard someone say that emotions are like subtle thought forms.
They are. But they are a consequence of belief. They are thought forms that have effects on the sensations in the body through chemistry, because the mind can trigger a release of certain chemicals that produce sensations and effects. But it all begins with believing a certain interpretation, a certain narrative. That belief creates a mental experience which is called emotion. It's actually the mammalian part of the brain, called mammalian because it is shared by mammals.
Is there a way you work with that kind of energy in the body, a way to release it?
Trauma as chronic belief
There's a whole process, because what's probably happening is that something is more chronically contained, stuck because it hasn't been processed. That is more normally addressed as trauma. There are very specific clinical definitions, but I speak of it more generally. The root of trauma is also a belief. What happens is that it's a belief which creates a chronic emotional response, and it persists until the belief is addressed. It's perpetual. That belief can overtake the whole system.
What happens is this: there is an experience, a traumatic experience, that usually produces an enormous amount of fear and pain that the body-mind is unable to fully process. The way it gets managed is through a belief system that gets created and incorporated, one that helps manage the energy of the feeling. But then that belief system creates a chronic handicap, like walking on crutches. What needs to be addressed is the capacity to feel the fear and pain that is present, the fear and pain that one has been managing, controlling, and pushing away through a belief system. When the belief system is dropped and the fear and pain are fully felt, the trauma is, you could say, healed. But it isn't that the body needs to be healed. That's a misleading metaphor. What heals is that we are able to drop the belief system that served as a crutch and fully be present with the pain and the fear associated with it.
The child who cannot process
It is very common for all of us to have gone through difficult experiences to varying degrees, especially in our earlier years. The body-mind, and the mind especially, isn't able to process all of that fully. So we enter adulthood with all of these unresolved experiences. In the Jungian sense, you could call this shadow work: what has become hidden, unconscious. But essentially it is the undoing of a process of managing and coping with experiences we weren't ready to fully process because we were too young, too unprepared, without support, without the understanding of how to do it. Humanity in general today still doesn't have a good understanding of this, although there are a few people who do understand and teach others, and that knowledge is spreading.
Imagine a child who has been unjustly blamed for something, slapped or pushed around, screamed at with aggression and frustration by a parent. That child is screaming in torment and pain and anguish because it feels betrayed by life. This is a very normal experience, but it overwhelms the system of that child. The child never really learns how to process it. It keeps happening in different ways and situations. Then we grow up and learn to contain all of that deep feeling, to set aside the beliefs and interpretations that were created in those moments. It's never processed, but it appears in normal life: going to work, relating to a partner, to a friend. Reactivities happen, and they are all based on beliefs created in those moments where we couldn't process what was happening. The belief makes it manageable.
The child is not able to say: "My parent is freaking out. They have no idea what they're doing. They're absolutely wrong. They're losing their mind. It's their problem, not mine. It has nothing to do with me. It's very painful, but I can sit here and feel that pain, and then it's okay." A child cannot do that. Neither can the parent, in most cases. Only when the parent can do that with themselves can it be taught to a child in the moment.
So the child in that moment concludes: something must be terribly wrong with me. And the way to manage and cope is by being a certain way, doing a certain thing, focusing on this or that. A whole belief system forms as a way to manage these dangerous situations, changing the child's natural way of being in order to avoid what it fears and create more of a sense of safety, making sure caregivers relate to them in the way they need. There is this whole dance happening.
Would you say it becomes a dance of rationalizing everything?
Rationalizing, managing, manipulating.
Emotions as escape
To come back to the initial point: everything the mind is doing is a huge dance of mental illusions and interpretations that create what appears to be a very real energetic reality, but it is just a consequence of those beliefs. So focus less on the energetics and the feelings and more on the belief system.
What can then happen is that we move outside the space of interpretation and go deeper into feeling. There is a difference between what I call emotion and what I call deep feeling. When I say deep fear and pain, it is not emotion. It is something prior to the emotional space. In fact, we create emotions to manage that deeper fear.
I think some emotions can be, in a way, great escapes from the problem.
Exactly. Emotion is a distraction, a masking. The deep pain could be a very gentle, long-lasting sadness that is very uncomfortable, a grief. Or it could be a pain where you find yourself curled into a ball like a two-year-old, screaming with very deep pain and grief. Or a fear where your whole body carries a current of very deep energetic fear. It is not the emotion of anxiety and stress. It is something much deeper.
Coming back to what you said, it's like a choice in a way. That pain is what I'm wanting subtly, because maybe I don't want to look at the thing. So the choice of the stories, the beliefs that create the emotions, which I can then infinitely process.
And it's all an avoidance of the deeper reality, the deep feeling that is harder to touch.
Thank you so much. You explained it very well.
You're very welcome.