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

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.

Different layers of reality and attention

Everything is the same energy. We just decode it on different levels. The higher levels are just as real that this physical level and can be perceived as such. We have just focused exclusively on the five sense, physical reality our whole lives, which is why we mainly or completely perceive it as real. The more we focus on other levels, the more we will perceive them. What you focus on grows. You can, for example, start focusing more on what goes on in the body. When you feel the energies that run through it constantly, focus more on them. You will see how they are connected to the the outer reality and how there is no sharp distinction between you and everything else. What you focus on grows.