Feel Your Way

Our intense emotions—even negative ones, like fear, anger, sadness, and grief—can be a path to spiritual growth.

By Sally Kempton

As I listened to Linda's story, my first thought was that she had discovered the power of meditation in the heart. Yet the deeper point of her experience isn't simply that it's nice to meditate in the heart center, or even that there's a better way of dealing with unrequited love than wallowing in it or trying to be stoical. Her story illustrates how inner spaciousness can be especially present and available when we're going through something that feels horrible—like having our heart broken, getting fired, facing our own capacity for anger, or dealing with a personal loss and the grief that attends it. It's almost as if a balancing principle is at work, a secret gift that our inner self can offer us during times that wring our soul.

Energy collects strongly at intense moments. If you don't know how to work with it, it can spin you into confusion or stress you into adrenal overload. But if you understand what intense energy is and practice working with it, it can and will transform your consciousness.

This is one of the deepest and most liberating truths that yoga offers us. I would even go so far as to say that it contains the gist of why we do inner practice at all. The whole yogic paradigm is based on the idea that there's something vast, loving, and spacious in the heart of reality, an awareness that connects all of us and that we uncover when we turn our attention inward. As we practice, we keep waking up to the source of our energy, moving past our fixed perceptions, feeling how it is to live from that vast, loving, and spacious source.

The Practice of Inclusion

Yet on the way to the spaciousness at our center, there are, as we all know, many roadblocks. Between our ordinary state of awareness and our deeper being, we sometimes encounter distractions, emotions, intellectual barricades, fantasies, and just plain dullness. The big question is what to do with these obstacles when we come across them. The Vijnana Bhairava's approach to practice aims to take us to the core of ourself by working with these roadblocks—by including everything in our experience yet reducing each experience and emotion to its essence. So the way it advises us to deal with obstacles is to move right into them and allow them to transmute themselves.

The enlightened sages who originally taught this practice were not just theorists. They actually lived in a state that allowed them to experience the pure awareness within the heart of everything, including the aspects of life that the rest of us regret. Their great realization was that everything we experience in life can provide us with a connection to the Divine. Since we are all, at our core, made of the same subtle loving energy, there is no part of us that can't lead us back to what we are. Even our thorniest feelings—anger, greed, fear—can take us there if we know how to distill them to their essence. Loving energy and angry energy are both, at the bottom, just energy.

We need to understand this in the right way, however. Loving actions lead to very different consequences than angry actions do. But at the deepest level, the core level, we can recognize that anger is not just anger, that fear is not just fear, that depression is not just depression. When we sit quietly with an emotion and go deeply inside it without acting it out, we find that it dissolves into pure consciousness. This is true of every feeling we have, especially when that feeling is strong and when we can let it mount to a peak but not allow it to explode. One of the most self-empowering choices we can make as yogis is to view our tough feelings as doorways to inner freedom.

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