How to Live Through Emotions Without Causing Harm
Oculus Archive. First published on 13.06.2022.
I read wise and deep questions in the comments. It seems to me they resonate inside many of us. I will reflect a little on these themes.
Hatred, anger, and aggression. Do I have the right not to feel these feelings, and what should I do when they are there?
The most obvious solution is to fight your feelings. But this struggle is just as destructive as the feelings themselves. From the point of view of yoga, our body is a separate being, very much like a child of about 5-7 years old. And our consciousness acts as the parent who teaches and punishes this child. And all our life we do nothing but punish our body and take pride in the fact that we were able to endure or survive something difficult. But it was not we who endured it; it was our body. After all, when it cannot endure, we lose consciousness.
And most of us are tyrants toward our body; we constantly tell the body that we need this and that, endure it, now is not the time. It is always only the voice of consciousness; we do not listen to our body, we do not make it happy. All emotions that we experience are the reaction of our body, and if out of habit we fight them, we will begin to experience double tension: one tension from the emotion, the second from the struggle with it. It is better to listen to yourself, to let the body express the emotion, but after that to pity the body, to pity yourself. Let the inner stress come out, do not restrain yourself inside.
Simply observe how this happens, but do not follow the emotion, do not create or recreate images that correspond to this emotion. If you see that the same images are spinning in your head, it means you are following them, which means you need a way out of this whirl.
Find any good thought, even a silly one. In everything bad there is always room for something good, and hold on to that good thought, and it will lead You out. No matter how bad things are, any good thought will become medicine. It is easier for believers; they can think about God. It is hard for a modern person to think about God and pray, because it is not modern, and the existence of God has not been proven. But the psychological effect is the same if You think about God or about something else, but just as positive; remember: "You are what you think about." You think about bad things - you feel bad.
It does not matter what people say, it does not matter that they demand hatred and the search for zrada. Each of us needs strength, and all negative emotions exhaust and directly harm us. It is better to put yourself in order while remaining reasonable and active than to hate and retransmit hatred.
Our body has a large number of wonderful mechanisms: when we are poisoned, we can vomit; when something gets into the nose, we sneeze; into the mouth, we cough. The brain has no such mechanism; it cannot cough up or belch out an intrusive feeling that harms us. We can only speak it out; it is enough to do this once. And in a miraculous way the emotion will recede. There is no need to say it to someone; you can say it alone, looking at a photo. This will be a kind of brain belch.
If you manage to keep yourself in hand and not give in to anger and aggression, this is a great gift and inner strength. This is harder to do than to hate everyone and lash out at each person. Show that it is possible, allow yourself to be normal. It is a great joy when a defender calls home and is told that everything is normal. Instead of people behaving like psychopaths, when it is unclear what to do now: go home to calm them down or crush the horde of orcs. There is no guilt in this. Do not feel guilty if you are normal; help your neighbor come to this normality.
What should I do when other people express their hatred and malice to me?
It does not matter whether it is righteous anger or not; it still remains anger. It does not matter whether society permits aggressive behavior or not; aggression remains aggression. These are the feelings of the one who experiences them. And when a person experiences these feelings in public, he infects them(us) with this emotion, since most people are empathic and can sympathize. One must try to explain to such a person that hatred and aggression are his own, and the harm he causes is to himself and those around him, not to those who are actually guilty.
I do not speak the language of Putin or the rashists; I speak the language of my mother. It is the rashists and Putin who speak my language. Feel the difference. They are murderers and beasts, but we are not. Therefore they must be destroyed with a cold heart and a sober mind, calculatingly and carefully, so as to conserve ammunition. In that case we act more effectively than during righteous anger.
If someone in power is guilty of something, we will sort it all out after the war. No one is going anywhere; now there is other work. Not all people are military, and not everyone can effectively do the work of the military. Everyone is needed in their place. It is not shameful to be the civilian population. The military must return from war to peace; if the entire civilian population becomes military, the military will return from war back into war.
It is normal to feel like an idler when the military are fighting. In peacetime the military feel like idlers. The civilian population must preserve peace, care for it, and make peace better. So that the military know they have somewhere to return to. So that they know they have family and friends. Not a country filled with neurotics and psychopaths who not only cannot help them come back to normal, but cannot even keep themselves in hand. Our calm and adequacy will be very useful to us in the future. We will have to surround our defenders with warmth and love.