Swings & See-Saws

Dr. Rajesh Bhola
India
Oct 26, 2012

 

Do you remember yourself as a child on a swing? You pushed (or were pushed) and you went up; then reached a high, and came down. Our feelings act similarly. The emotional swings come from our beliefs. If we get good news we feel pushed up; bad news swings us back down. It is also like the see saw rides. When our side goes up, we feel high; when the other side goes up, we start feeling low. This is the world of our feelings, faiths and beliefs. At times we are out of touch with, or busy suppressing, our feelings; at other times we are overwhelmed by them. 

Feelings are fickle. They have little base in reality. If we think we are right our feelings take us up – and vice-versa. Right and wrong have no foundation except in our mind. Psychologists often have people come and present themselves as being out of touch with their feelings. Feelings arise from an exposure to particular stimuli. A person who is out of touch with his feelings is probably not facing their pain either. What comes up in us is largely a series of conditioned responses. For us to find our feelings, we do not need to look for them; we just need to hold our attention to the stimuli that may be expected to produce them. 

Feelings are natural and proper. Even an ‘advanced’ spiritual person feels. The belief, overt or implicit, that enlightenment will be reached only when we get emotions of a particular kind, or when ‘bad’ feelings have been eliminated, is quite untrue. One of the volunteers at our Society, who had been in the psychiatric ward of a hospital for a long time and was now gradually returning to ‘normal life’, came to me one day and said “ I have cried for the first time in my life, and I know you will be pleased.” She was right. This was a person who, despite being thorugh so much tragedy, had been unable to express any feelings of distress or dejection. 

As a counsellor, particularly to parents who have special children, I spend much of my time listening. As I tune in to them a kind of resonance starts to occur. I feel something of what they feel. As they describe what concerns them, I imaginatively accompany them and start treading the same difficult path which they have passed through. This experience of empathetic resonance, or negative capability, is well-known to counsellors and psychotherapists. It takes a certain amount of training, however, to realize that these are not simply ‘my own feelings’, even though I am really feeling them. When I realize that they are not mine, then noticing what is arising in me gives me very helpful information about the suffering of the parents. 

This experience of becoming a container for feelings which have been triggered by listening emphatically to somebody else’s story also enables us to learn  that we are containers for the feelings triggered by our own story. Even when the feelings are my own, in the sense that they relate to events in my own life, it is still possible for me to regard them with a degree of dispassion even as they are occurring: by being not too close and not too far away.” This is also one the acknowledged modern techniques for developing leadership, and is known as ‘acting while sitting in the gallery also’ method of realizing the difficulties of others.

This ability to be both in and aside from the feeling, at the same time, is something that needs to be cultivated. No religion teaches us to not have feelings. We cannot stop feelings. We are to allow the process to flow, whilst also being able to observe it. The flow of feelings gives us essential information about our lives. To cut them off would be one extreme – the extreme of asceticism. To abandon ourselves to their control would be the other extreme – the extreme of indulgence. There is a middle way, a middle current where life flows effectively. There we can observe feeling, while in the feelings.

Dr. Rajesh Bhola is President of Spastic Society of Gurgaon and is working for the cause of children with autism, cerebral palsy, mental retardation and multiple disabilities for more than 20 years.