Moods, feelings, and sensations are like the weather. You can check the weather, notice it, and adapt–put on a coat, or peel off some layers. If you’re wise, you pay attention, at least a little, but you don’t define yourself by the weather.
When a child is ill with the flu, the good mother soothes, and takes this as a sign to slow everything down. With fluids and rest, the symptoms will abate. The child may fussily fight rest, but the mother soothes the child and lulls him into comfort. Like illness, emotions are experienced physically. They tell us to pay attention, and maybe slow things down just enough to notice….something….a little more. It requires experience, not thought, to begin to understand. It requires slowing down to get to deeper meaning.
Feelings, moods, and sensations are not inherently problematic, nor is the weather. Therefore they don’t need a solution. Maybe they just need a bit of attention. The solution became the problem for me, just as Paul Watzlawick described in his elegant treatise on change. Feelings were not the problem–my belief that I needed to manage them to survive was a real problem. The solution I tried was to rely on my cognitive abilities to contain, change, or categorize my experiences. I defined myself as this or that, and then tried to live up to those definitions. I became less sensitive and less flexible. None of this worked too well. I experienced increasing strain yet saw this as another thing to be managed. Therefore I failed to pay enough attention. After all, if a strategy isn’t working, do it MORE!
It’s humorous to me now to recall the many times I found myself freezing or broiling because I’d ignored the thermometer, insisting on going coatless because it was April, or on wearing wool in December. Paying attention to the weather has been a learning curve for me. So too with tolerating, accepting, and eventually embracing the lovely unpredictability and unknowableness of most of life. And that includes emotions, even the unpleasant ones.
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