Working With Our Emotional Bodies and Challenging Emotions

Written by Roan Kaufman for Ayavolve.com on June 11, 2018

“Despair… is the only cure for illusion. Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality—it’s a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur without it. “

–Philip Slater

Working with our emotional bodies is an important part of the ayahuasca and other plant medicine healing processes. Where we get stuck is when we suppress our emotions and avoid facing the feelings that are deep within us. And ayahuasca has a way of bringing these emotions to the surface.

I would suggest, however, that the movement towards Prozac reality has weakened our despair immune system so that we can no longer tolerate the ebbs and flows of despair “unpleasant” emotions. And this is a tragedy unto itself and a barrier to the healing process.

We need our despair and our confusion as a way to live a spiritual life.

This is not the rainbows and unicorn reality that the surface dwellers would seduce us to believe or how some others approach medicine work. We cannot become whole in our healing if we ignore and deny the pain we feel from our lives and if we simply ignore or pretend those around us are not suffering. That would be a form of delusion, or ignorance.

We need to learn ways to more holistically relate to our suffering as waves of the ocean that come and go, sometimes big crashing waves, and sometimes little gentle waves—but with each wave, we can embrace it and ride it out. Self-love in this way is the foundation to love others.

Thich Nhat Hahn suggests that the biggest gift we can give others who are suffering is simply to listen to them with a soft heart. To simply give them our undistracted attention. We can do this for ourselves as well as we are attentive to the vulnerable voices and tender spots within.

When it comes to emotions, most of us are taught that they should be private, and isolated. From an Indigenous framework, however, emotions crack us out of a sense of the individual self into a larger narrative. The larger narrative being accessing things like universal grief and emotions related to collective memory. This memory includes the trauma of our world, wars, the destruction of Mother Earth, and the suffering of the children of this world—to name a few. Our access to our own suffering and our ability to name it helps us to connect more deeply to our connections to the webs of life. And being able to access our emotions is a critical part of the healing process.

From an Indigenous framework, however, emotions crack us out of a sense of the individual self into a larger narrative. The larger narrative being accessing things like universal grief and emotions related to collective memory. This memory includes the trauma of our world, wars, the destruction of Mother Earth, and the suffering of the children of this world—to name a few. Our access to our own suffering and our ability to name it helps us to connect more deeply to our connections to the webs of life. And being able to access our emotions is a critical part of the healing process.

We learn to surf intense waves during ceremonies as well. Sometimes the medicine is brutal and we wish it would slow down or mellow out, but we can only learn to breathe those moments and pray, or find the tensions in our reactions to soften them a little bit. This is just like riding the waves of emotion in our lives—our grief, our rage, our fears, our numbness. We can simply sit with these feelings then use them as a way to access loving kindness for ourselves and those around us.

Here is one example of Tibetan Buddhist Lovingkindness (Metta) prayer we can chant for all beings of this world (including human beings, plant beings, animals, and anyone/thing with consciousness):

May “all beings” be happy, healthy and whole.

May they have love, warmth and affection.

May they be protected from harm, and free from fear.

May they be alive, engaged and joyful.

May “all beings” enjoy inner peace and ease.

May that peace expand into their world and throughout the entire universe.