Truth, values, principles and trust in God

In the times ahead, we are going to need to be trusting. Not trusting in worldly authorities, but in God, who is infinitely more powerful and wise than any human. If we believe in the God of the Bible, trusting in God means that we trust that some truths and values are sacred. No matter what goes on in the world. We must trust the almighty creator of the universe enough to believe that he has a plan. And believe in his plan enough to hold on to what we believe in, even when many will say that we are heading for disaster. When many will say that because of our situation, we have to comply what we know to be wrong. If, in the name of emergency, we will be asked to comply with what we know to be wrong, we must have the faith and strength to say no.

Ultimately it is a question of love and fear. Whether you want to interpret Satan symbolically or literally, you can call God love and Satan fear. God is truth. Satan is the father of lies. Satan wants to scare you into submission. God wants to love you into willing obedience. Satan wants to force you into things that are not in your best interest. God wants to, loving and gently, show you what he knows is for your highest good. 

When we see absolute truth we recognize it. Absolute truth doesn’t need intellectual arguments. Absolute truth is recognized as such as soon as we give up trying to understand it with the intellect. We just know, because it is written into our hearts. Think of it this way: Values that have truth in them, such as love, compassion, balanced generosity, freedom and so on, don’t need explanation. We just recognize them as good. And the opposite is also true. Values such as power hunger, boastful pride, greed etcetera are recognized as bad without us having to argue for it.

We are now in a time where many believe that everything is relative. We also live in a world that to many is devoid of higher meaning or purpose. And there is a big danger in this, because when we don’t have any truths or values to hold on to, we easily become victims of expediency. There we have another ugly word by the way: “expediency”. One that, coupled with “relativism”, becomes downright lethal. Especially in a world where so many dangers are present or lurking on the horizon. From this perspective, it’s easy to accept whatever deemed necessary to ensure survival. Those of us that have faith in a personal, almighty God with a will and a plan, must have the courage to trust that plan and not give our consent, when worldly authorities overstep their boundaries.

If you look at the Bible, both the Old and New Testament, it is full of people that are prepared to die for what they stand for. Prepared to bet their very existence in this world on God and his son. When someone comes and asks you to give up your freedom in the name of emergency and maybe even threatens your life if you don’t comply, will you have the courage, faith and strength to refuse?

Never forget that God is with us!

Being out of touch with our emotions - a male perspective PART 1

How do you relate to your emotions? Have you given it much thought? I know that I’m terribly out of touch with my emotions, even though I’ve worked with my inner life quite a bit. And I’m neither a macho man nor the type of soft, effeminate, modern guy that many Swedish men take up as an identity either. I’m very skeptical towards these types of identities.

The point is that if I’m out of touch with my emotions, there are countless men that are in a much worse condition than I am. And the thing is, that no matter how tough we manage to convince ourselves that we are, there is no getting away from our messed up emotions. There is something messed up with the most fundamental aspects of being human and we need to start paying attention to this. 

I know that this is not a problem that relates to just men either. To some degree, I believe that most people have some degree of dysfunction with regards to their emotions. But the situation is different for men. Throughout a large part of our history, emotions have been labelled as a bit unmanly by large segments of the population. As men, we’ve been supposed to suppress them and push them down. And surely, there is some validity to not go around crying over every little minor problem, no matter if you’re a man or a woman. But suppressed emotions stay in our bodies and wreak havoc in our lives.

I’ve decided that I want to explore how emotions work through books and other means, so that I can shed some light on my own emotional deficiencies and see what conclusions that I can draw from this. 

In this first post I want to touch just briefly on the situation that me and many others, mainly men, have found ourselves in when it comes to our emotions. This is, as the title says, a male perspective, but hopefully it can provide some food for thought for women as well, and maybe help women to understand men better in this regard. Because I believe that many problems in the world stem from a lack of understanding. We think that we understand how other people think and draw our conclusions about them based on that. And it’s not uncommon that we judge based on this.

First of all, I don’t think the answer to the problem is for men to try and be more like women. I believe that men and women function differently emotionally (even if some, mostly for ideological reasons, claim that they don’t). Therefore, I believe that men need to find their own ways of relating to their emotions. Even if I’ll admit that men probably have a lot of things that they can learn from women about emotions. I mean, it’s still the same emotions and we don’t inhabit entirely different worlds or speak entirely different languages. And women are in general more in touch with their emotions.  

You probably notice something now, when I point it out. Namely that this text, a text about emotions, is very intellectualizing. That is because this is how I’ve approached things for most of my life. For most of my life I’ve lived in my head a lot. This has not only led me to be out of touch with my emotions, but also with the place where the emotions are felt - the body. I didn’t really start to inhabit my body until a few of years ago, even though I had been meditating and practicing yoga for much longer. 

At the same time, I guess that, in a sense this is unavoidable. Because you cannot make sense of anything, including emotions, without using the intellect to label, analyze and describe. But you must also not stop there. You have to feel what you are talking about. And here I’ve got some work to do.

Not until a few years back I realized that emotions are just as valid when it comes to perceiving and interacting with the world, as thoughts are. Perhaps even more. Our emotions don’t lie to us, while our thoughts often do. Including our thoughts about our emotions. 

It’s of course difficult to talk about something as personal as emotions, even with those closest to us. So it’s even more difficult to do it with something that anyone is free to read. There are lots of social rules when it comes to this. And I neither want to or think that I should share the most intimate details about my emotional life with anyone.

What I am going to do however, is to talk a bit about some of the things that I’ve been carrying around in the other posts in this series. I don’t know how long this series is going to be, since I’m discovering and processing things as I write.

This post I wish to conclude with something that I’ve realized over the past few years: No suppressed emotion goes away. The emotional energy gets stored in the body. And it often comes out as another emotion instead. And sometimes the emotions get buried so deep, that they are not consciously experienced at all. I believe this to be the case with for example really violent and dangerous people. They may be the ones that carry around the most fear, but have completely lost touch with it. I myself have never been violent. But I have carried around a lot of fear that I earlier in my life tried to hide behind a tough exterior. I of course did not know that this was what I was doing at the time. But I most certainly was. 

Photo by Alora Griffiths on Unsplash

A non-reactive mindset

It’s difficult not to react to things. Something happens that we think shouldn’t happen and we get an emotional reaction. The emotions translate either into thoughts or actions. And we end up making things worse, either on the inside or the outside. On the inside by suppressing them so that they get stored inside the body as tension. Or on the outside by acting on them and thereby for example get into conflicts or break things.

We cannot choose how we feel. But we can choose what we think and how we act. We can choose actively to bring awareness and acceptance into what is happening in the moment, both inside ourselves and outside ourselves. And this, in turn, will affect our emotions.

I think that fear is the root of the negative emotions. Fear is reactive. Love is proactive. When I for example get angry, I’m really afraid that I will get hurt or that I won’t have my needs met. If something for example breaks, it triggers a whole cascade of different fears. Fear that it will waste my time so that I won’t manage to do things in time, fear that I won’t afford to fix or replace it and that I won’t have the things that I need in order. These are of course my fears that get triggered. Yours might be different. And it can often be difficult to know why we feel what we feel before we have started to think consciously about it. An interesting thing is that just by thinking consciously about something we start changing it.

The point is that I can choose if I want to feed this emotional state with my thoughts and actions or not.

When we primarily just react to things we also become predictable. And this, I believe, is worth thinking about. Because right now algorithms predict our online behavior and provide us with stimuli to manipulate us. But I truly believe that if we start living in the now, from a place of conscious awareness, make proactive choices instead of reactive ones and are clear about our values and why we have them, we diminish the chance of machines turning us into robots. Because we are truly wonderful, glorious children of God, destined to walk freely together with our loving creator. 

And conscious awareness is key here. The more we become aware of our actions and take responsibility for our unconscious behavior, the better we will become at getting out of our reactive mindsets. We must not allow our thoughts to provide us with nonsensical explanations of our reactive behaviors. Rather, we need to se these behaviors for what they are. A non-reactive mindset really doesn’t take any effort to cultivate. But we need to keep reminding us of it over and over again. This is the key. To remember to not get swept up in unconsciousness.

Fear is an energy that attaches itself to the heart

I’ve noticed something in my yoga practice recently. Namely that I come to a point in my breathing, where it feels like I don’t get enough oxygen. A feeling of panic arises in my chest. But if I just accept the feeling, neither reacting to- nor resisting it, I feel how blockages get released inside my body and head, especially blockages around the heart.

I have noticed that there is a huge block here. And the more I release, the more I am able to let love into my life. What I believe that this means, is that there is a real, physical way of experiencing the fundamental truth, that life ultimately comes down to a choice between love and fear.

Fear ultimately comes down to the fear of death. It is not always physical death. It can also be the fear of living a life that feels like one has already died.

Since I experienced this and the more I practice this non-resistance during yoga, I’ve noticed that it becomes easier and easier to feel these stored emotions even when I don’t do yoga. And when I truly don’t react to them at all, as I feel them inside my body, but just allow them to be there and to be felt fully, I am able to let them go. 

I want to talk about this more in depth in another post, but the foundation of this is to learn to stay present inside our heads and not let our attention drift elsewhere, while at the same time feeling whatever goes on inside the body without reacting to it. In the beginning there will be a tendency to react when we feel these blockages. But with practice we will become better at just feeling whatever it is that we are feeling.

In the beginning, at least for me, it was difficult to feel these emotional blocks inside my body. I just felt them as stiffness and constriction, but not the emotions behind them. But the more I put focused attention on what was going on inside my body, the more I started to get into contact with the emotions behind these blockages.