Being out of touch with our emotions - a male perspective PART 2

To PART 1

I want to start this post 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. And since I’ve suppressed a lot, probably more than most people, I’ve also had a lot to release. And even though I’ve worked a lot with this, I still have a long way to go.

I’m obviously not the first man in history that has taken my emotional life as a man seriously. For example the writer Robert Bly has written about it. Professor, writer and psychologist Jordan Peterson certainly takes emotions seriously. And probably every male artist that has ever produced something of value, must have been at least somewhat in touch with his emotional life, even if it often has been in a chaotic, neurotic way, such as the emotional lives of men like August Strindberg, Vincent van Gogh or why not any of the beatnicks. 

Think for a second how crippling it is for a man to live with this emotional deficiency that our culture has instilled in us from generation to generation. To be, to different degrees, depending on the individual, cut off from such a vital part of what it means to be human. Another reason among many to be skeptical about culture, huh? We grow up taking so many things for granted. And when these things are questioned, the proposed solutions are often even worse than that which has been put into question. To put it bluntly, I don’t like the feminist, politically correct approach to the problem of male emotional deficiency one bit. I don’t want to become more like a woman in order to get more in touch with my emotions. I want to be a man that fully feels. Just like I believe that women need to become more empowered while embracing their femininity and not by becoming more like men. 

Things are not always as they seem on the surface. There is a divine order to things. Whether we recognize it or not. And if we mess with this order we suffer for it. I will go more into detail about this in the next post. But for now I will just say that human beings cannot be treated as blank slate which we can imprint whatever we want on, in order to reach a desired goal. Not without creating emotional dysfunctions, that are at their core spiritual. Dysfunctions that will most definitely lead to dysfunctions on a social level, both in the interactions between individuals and in the collective. 

I’m hardly the only one that is tired of how ideas of how we are supposed to be, seem to always be pushed upon us from above through some sort of ideology. How it sneaks up on us through the mass-media and the movies and music that we consume. I want to be fully human on my own terms and not be brainwashed into some image of what a contemporary man or woman should be like. I want to embrace the nature that God put into me, and not the twisted ways of the world. What we had a hundred years ago was definitely not healthy. But can you really say that what we have today is an improvement of that?

In many ways, I think that healthy emotional expression has to do with appropriateness. This is because another answer that cannot be it, is to just let the emotions go and allow them to be expressed in any way they want, whenever they come up. We don’t become emotionally mature by just letting our emotions run rampant. What is the alternative? Well, here are some ideas that I’ve come across so far. As in many cases we come back to mindfulness and to train ourselves into a non-reactive mindset. To push down our emotions and not express them at all is a bad idea. But we can train ourselves to not express them in a reactive manner. In other words to not express them in the first way that comes up. Instead we can take a step back and first try to understand what it is that we are actually feeling. Which is not always self-evident. And then we can consciously think of a way of expressing the emotion.

And now it’s time to share something that I felt very reluctant about. But I don’t want to go around pretending that I’m perfect, even though my ego would love for me to do so. But the real me wants to look at all aspects of my life and see what can be learned from them. The real me doesn’t care about perfection. Only about truth, knowledge and understanding.

So here we go: As I said in the beginning, I’ve never been a violent person. But I do have some minor anger issues, that have made me shout and punch walls in the past. I have become better with this lately though and it was quite a while since I did this. But I still have to be vigilant with myself when something happens that knocks me off balance. 

These types of reactions have always been followed by feelings of shame and hopelessness because I hate the feeling of not being in control of myself. And I especially hate the feeling of losing control when someone else sees it. I’m trying to look at it as just a pattern that I’ve unconsciously practiced since I was a child, but which can be unlearned with the right tools. 

Then, in my youth, I often learned to suppress my anger. So I never learned to deal with anger in a healthy way. And on top of that, I’ve learned that other negative emotions can be transformed into anger as well, when they are suppressed. I’ve found mainly grief and fear hiding behind my anger. It is also often tied to a sense of lack of control, which in turn is linked to really low emotions, such as helplessness, regret, shame and hopelessness. 

This is not what my soul is like. It is how my soul’s vehicle functions because I’ve never learned how to operate it properly. It’s not as if our bodies and brains come with an instruction manual and our education system is next to useless when it comes to such crucial learning. But I’ve learned tons of stuff that I will never have any use for instead…

Something that I came to think of with regards to this, is that when I took a couple of courses in psychology at the university, we learned that domestic abusers were motivated by a drive to dominate. This was framed as men’s will to dominate women. But what if this is incorrect. What if at least many of these men feel helpless in most areas of life, but try to dominate the few areas where they can feel powerful? It doesn’t make it any more okay, but it sheds a totally different light on the problem. The problem is no longer dominant men that use force to subjugate women. It instead becomes broken, disempowered men that try to grab on to what little power they can in their lives, in the most dysfunctional, destructive way possible. I would never say that this is always the case. There are of course throughly cruel people, that use violence in a cold, calculated way. But what if these are the minority cases? 

I think that there is a case to be made for changing gender norms for both men and women. Just not in the way that is taught by political correctness. But in this case, the focus might need to shift from what is wrong with men, to what is wrong with a society that creates these specific men. And when I think about it, aren’t the cold calculating men, at least to a certain degree, also created by societal norms? Norms that, while having to do with gender, also have to do with the value we ascribe to power in general. Maybe our relation to power has a lot to do with dysfunctional emotions? This is something that I need to think more about. And by extension, what role power plays in my and other people’s lives in general.

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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. 

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UNUSUAL and IMPORTANT questions about how to make life run more smoothly

Banging my head against the wall doesn’t work. Neither does it work to just let myself go and just do whatever feels good at the moment. Both these approaches to life come from the ego. 

So, maybe, if I feel constricted somewhere, I need to make that a priority, in a way that works. I need to ask myself: why do I feel this tightness in my chest? Why do I feel blocked in certain areas of my life? Why does this or that thing not work the way I want them to? What do I need to make this or that thing run more smoothly? What is it that does work well? Can I get more of that? Why does it work well?

We often try to power through doing the same thing over and over again. Or we completely let go, give up and say that there is no point. 

Now, what I’m beginning to realize, is that everything is at the core energy in motion. And this sounds really vague and airy, but hear me out. How often do we stand back and really feel the energy of whatever we are doing? Of whatever situation that we find ourselves in? In the end, it all comes down to awareness. And bringing more awareness into our lives is everything. To experience more in the present moment. To feel more of what we actually are feeling. 

I’ve often noticed that when I remember to do this, feel the energy of what I am doing and what is going on, I can quite easily feel how energy either flows calmly, smoothly and efficiently or if it feels slow and inert. Or if it’s agitated and erratic. My body is often the first to tell me. Do I feel light, full of life and joy? Or am I heavy or tight and tense somewhere? Can I really feel my body and the energies that flow in it? Or Does it feel numb and and blocked? 

Am I in a mode of acceptance or resistance towards what is? If I resist, I block the energy flow. And I cannot be present in the moment and resist at the same time. Resistance always impies a loss of consciousness. And a loss of consciousness always blocks our energy. And so on. So we need to be present, accept what is and feel what we really feel. All of it fits together. We can’t have one without the other. And when it falls into place energy flows. Life flows.

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Non-resistance is THE game changer

It’s strange to think that I’ve been doing all of this searching to come to this simple conclusion. The basics are as follows. Life consists of an infinite amount of moments, since time is infinitely dividable. In every moment we have a choice of whether to say yes or no to what is happening. We always have this choice, even if the circumstances affect how easy or hard it is to see this choice. 

The foundation of saying yes to the present moment is to be present with it. We are present with it by being here and now. To do that we allow as much of our experience as possible. We are present inside our heads, really see what it is that we are seeing and really feel what it is that we are feeling. Every time that we feel a tension inside our heads or our bodies, we are resisting in one way or another. When we are not resisting, everything flows naturally. If everything does not flow naturally, we are resisting. 

Most of the thoughts that we have in our heads are resistance in one form or another. They bring us out of the present moment, tell us why the present moment is not as it should be and distract us in different ways. 

What I have noticed is that when I don’t resist things, everything is effortless. Problems in my body correct themselves. The things that I do have a natural, totally efficient flow to them. I feel a peaceful relaxation inside myself, my breath flows naturally and I expend very little energy doing the things that I do. I pay attention to what is going on and do things in a systematic way. Solutions to problems seem to present themselves out of nowhere. 

The only problem is that every moment offers the possibility of forgetting this state. So I have to keep reminding myself to live in this state over and over again. It is a completely effortless shift, but because I’m so used to struggling, the shift will be accompanied by some discomfort. This discomfort is however illusory. There is nothing hard about this whatsoever. It’s just about learning a new way of functioning from.

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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.

The need to prove ourselves DESTROYS confidence

If I’m present with myself, I can observe the energy behind what I’m saying. This might sound a little vague, but let me explain. 

As I’m getting more into contact with myself, my confidence grows and with it my speech changes when I interact with other people in different circumstances. I feel that I’m becoming more and more capable of handling the situations that arise in my life and I feel more and more like someone who actually knows what he’s doing. Not just someone that tries to make other believe this. Which has been how I’ve felt in the past. Even if I wouldn’t have admitted this to myself while it was going on. 

But something that has not gone away, which I’ve noticed lately, is my need to prove myself. It was stronger when I lacked real confidence. But it still lingers. When I observe the words that come out of my mouths, some of them are the same types of attempts at making others believe certain things about me. This neither confident nor powerful. It’s certainly not humble. And if I’m really observant, I can feel the energy shift when I go into this mode. Feel how I’m losing the person that I’m speaking to a bit.

What would be a more powerful approach? Well, to simply keep in mind that I don’t have to prove myself to anyone. To be clear about my intention and focus on what’s important. To not I attach some importance to how other people view me as a person. Not because I need to prove that I’m intelligent, in control, strong, disciplined etcetera. Because I know that I have a genuinely confident side, which grows stronger and comes out more frequently the more I work on myself. The more challenges that I handle rather than run away from them. And when I act and speak from this side of myself, people tend to respond in a positive manner without me having to think of what impression I want to make. 

What's going on on the inside Part 3

When I’ve focused on the energies inside my body, I’ve noticed that they correspond with my physical sensations, my body’s, movements and even what is going on on the outside. I’ve  started to feel the mood of other people much more strongly. 

Furthermore, I’ve realized that I’ve numbed and pushed down many emotions in different ways. And that these emotions haven’t simply vanished, but have instead been stored in my body as tensions. I’ve also noticed these emotions get activated in situations that trigger them. This means that when something happens that upset me emotionally, if I manage to be present enough to notice it, I can feel that the areas where I have tensions tense up more than usual, and that this is the areas where I can feel the emotions most strongly. Finally, I’ve noticed that when I don’t react to these emotions and don’t try to push them away either, but simply let them be there, I can let go of them. I’ve released many tensions this way and my body feels much less tense today, than it did just a couple of years ago.

What's going on on the inside Part 2

The truth is that there is a lot of the things that I’ve discovered that I don’t understand fully. Just that I’ve discovered something significant that has been hidden in plain sight for most of my life. 

Looking inside has made me wonder about the connection between thoughts and emotions. What effect thoughts and emotions have on our day to day lives. I have discovered that when I shift focus between different body parts and the sensations in them I can create very different experiences. I can for example create a totally different experience for myself, depending on if I for example focus on the sensations in my fingertips or the taste in my mouth. Depending on if I’m lost in thoughts or engaging in what is actually going on or what I’m actually doing.

What's going on on the inside Part 1

I know that a key component in what is happening right now, is to become aware of what is going on on the inside. When we start feeling our bodies, we start to experience energies flowing through them. When we observe our thoughts, we see that many of them are just repeating themselves over and over again. It’s often negative content that makes us feel bad. But we can also see that some of them contain what seems to be messages. We notice that the stream of thoughts never stops. That we can’t stop it and that when we try, we soon seem to forget what we are doing. Maybe we start to ask important questions, such as: What are thoughts really anyway? How do they function? Maybe we start wondering why we’ve never asked this before, about something that goes on throughout all of our waking lives. Maybe we start seeing that we have much more choice when it comes to our thoughts. That how we treat our thoughts right now, is not our nature, but rather habits. 

Learning to walk

I am more and more becoming aware of different layers of reality. Of how I have a whole network of energy inside myself that I can come into contact with just by focusing on it. But since I’ve had my attention firmly placed in the five-sense reality, I have the experience of a toddler just learning to walk, when it comes to these other aspects of reality. 

These aspects are just as real as the physical, five-sense reality. They actually seem to be the same as the five-sense reality. The best theory that I’ve encountered, say that at the core, everything is energy, but we can decode this energy in different ways. And one of these ways is the one that creates the five-sense reality. 

So, it’s time to learn to walk by putting more and more focus on these other aspects. The interesting thing is, that when I focus on these other aspects of reality, the effect is not that I withdraw from the five senses and become neglectful of the physical. On the contrary, focusing on, for example, the energies inside, puts me in a flow state, where everything just seems to run more effortlessly. And if I’m focused on the energies around me, I become able to detect more of the subtle nuances of other people’s behaviour, or the things that God wants to tell me through the events in my life.

Is everything energy on higher levels?

So, I’m starting to suspect that those that say that we are multidimensional beings are right. I’m still trying to wrap my head around this and writing this down is one way of doing so. At the core seems to be that we interact with reality in many ways simultaneously, but within our “normal” perception, we only see and experience this reality. At the same time, all realities are the same. It’s just our perception of them that has different levels. But perception is everything, since what we focus on determines where we direct our energy.

What is happening, is that I’m more and more starting to feel the energy behind what I’m saying and doing. And if I’m focused on this energy, I seem to be able to direct it, which plays out as a flow state in this reality. In other words, if I’m focused on the energy, my mind and my body will act in accordance with the energy, without my little ego me having to use any force to make it happen. But if I feel into this energy, I can let it guide my behaviors and actions. Heck, I could maybe even allow it to direct my thoughts. And consequently let my thoughts tell me what state I’m in, rather than, as we usually do, identify with them and. believe what they say about reality and other people.

This is also in line with the chakra system, which says that we have different energy blockages in the body that affects our physical reality and what we experience in it. What I’m beginning to see, is how when I run into an energy blockage, which in this way of perceiving reality manifests in the form of a tension, I’m yanked out of the present moment and so I’m back in 3D-reality, with the struggling and forcing that goes along with it. And so I go unconscious. I don’t exactly understand the mechanism behind this. But it’s as if I wake up for a while, until I unconsciously run into an energy blockage. And then I continue to be unconscious till I become aware that this has happened. 

When I become aware, I have the choice of going into this higher state again. At this point, my ego will offer up some irrational resistance, telling me stuff like “you’ve already messed up, so it’s not worth the effort to get up again”. Even though it takes no effort at all. It’s just about switching the inner state.

At the highest level, I suspect that it’s about opening up to God and allow God to take control completely, while I still maintain my volitional control. It’s a paradox that I believe to be true, but which I cannot fully understand from my current way of being.

This is hard for me to describe, so please, if anything is unclear here, ask me a question.