This is another good Daily Om. Some thoughts below.
Setting A Limit To Sit With Emotions
How Long
Our emotions color our lives with varying palettes. Sometimes we feel a strong emotion in reaction to something that has happened, but emotions also visit us seemingly out of the blue, flooding us unexpectedly with joy or grief or melancholy. Like the weather, they come and go, influencing our mental state with their particular vibration. Sometimes a difficult emotion hangs around longer than we would like, and we begin to wonder when it will release its hold on us. This is often true of grief stemming from loss, for example, or lingering anger over a past event.
Usually, if we allow ourselves to feel our emotions fully when they come up, they recede naturally, giving way to another and another. When an emotion haunts us, it is often because we are afraid of really feeling it. Emotions like despair and rage are powerful, and it is natural to want to hold them at bay. Certainly, we don’t want to let them take us over so that we say or do things we later regret. When we are facing this kind of situation, it can be helpful to ask the spirit, “How long do I need to sit with these emotions, how long do I need to feel these emotions before they can pass?” If you ask sincerely and wait, an answer will come. Setting a time limit on your engagement with that difficult emotion may be just the technique you need to face it fully.
When you have a sense of how much time you need to spend, set a timer. Sit down and make yourself available to the emotion that has been nagging you. All you have to do is feel it. Avoid getting attached to it or rejecting it. Simply let it ebb and flow within you. Emotions are by their nature cyclical, so you can trust that just as one reaches its apex it will pass. Each time you sit with its presence without either repressing or acting out, you will find that that difficult emotion was the catalyst for much needed emotional healing.
I agree that sitting with emotions is the only way to release them most times. We have a tendency to want to avoid hard feelings, so we push them down in some way or another (food, drugs, alcohol, television, sex, or whatever). If we can allow them to flow through us, they release rather quickly most times.
The other side of this is that we can get attached to an emotion -- some of us have spent a lot of time feeling miserable because we wanted to, or (perversely) thought we deserved it. Becoming attached to an emotion can often result in that emotion becoming our identity, though we seldom see how this is happening unless we are very mindful.
Rather than asking spirit h0w long we need to sit with an emotion (which is really asking some version of our higher self), I recommend a dialogue with the emotion itself. This applies mostly to emotions and feelings that have hung in for an extended period of time, no matter how much we have sat with them. Sometimes we need to learn something before they will release.
Treat the emotion with compassion, as though it is a separate self. Use active imagination or voice dialogue to find out what it needs, what it wants to teach you. If we allow them to teach us what we need to learn, emotions -- even the dark and painful ones -- can be powerful allies.
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