The Dalai Lama helps chart the territory of emotion.
“When we wanted to get to the New World, we needed a map. So make a map of emotions, so we can get to a calm state.”
Emotions are tricky entities. They confuse the mind and disturb perception, isolating an individual in a private sense of reality. So what to do with them? A type-cast, non-dual stance has been to banish feelings and emotions to the Neverland of illusion. They’re not real. Don’t trust them. Disown them. Now, the Dalai Lama has teamed up with Dr. Paul Ekman, his daughter Dr. Eve Ekman and a top team of psychologists to suggest otherwise. Emotions are the territory we live in: they are here to be navigated, and to navigate them, we need a map.
Dalai-LamaAs Matt Lucia recently wrote: “Out of the very intelligent need to escape, we unfolded unique strategies of fight/ flight/ freeze, to take us out of dysregulating states of intense vulnerability and groundlessness, and away from the overwhelming aliveness of the somatic and emotional worlds.” To say it more simply, we have been conditioned to fear and feel ashamed about our emotions. Responding to pressing psychological need, however, voices from the nondual community are increasingly calling for greater compassion towards our own emotions (and those of others), as vehicles of human wholeness.
In the words of Jeff Foster, “It’s becoming clearer that the real adventure, the real beauty and joy of life, lies not in being ‘nobody’, in detaching yourself from the world, in numbing yourself to feelings and denying emotions, in endlessly parroting spiritual clichés such as “there is no me” and “everything is a story”… but in rediscovering your deep humanity, in being a person again (yes, a person!), in fully engaging with life from a place of vulnerability and deep acceptance, in dancing with so-called ‘relative existence’.
But how to navigate the fields of emotion among us? Must emotions be first identified and honored in order to be seen and surrendered?
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Atlas of Emotions - Dalai Lama In the Field of Emotions
https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/atlas-of-emotions-dalai-lama-in-the-fields-of-emotion/
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