Be Friend With Your Emotions and Predicament

Children are motivational resilient naturally. This minute she cries aloud, the next minute she laughs out aloud.  Since when did we adults lose this resilience? For me, perhaps it was my second semester at a university when I found I didn’t quite like the major I chose for myself, and the university didn’t have the system in place to allow its students to change majors.  Adapting to city life was also challenging,  for as a village girl I had never traveled more than 50 kilometers away from home before entering a university located several thousand kilometers away home, although it was my own idea: the farther away from home, the better, as if there were poems and dreams in a far-away land.  Although I only moved from one part of the country to another, there is a language barrier to cross: learning to speak in Putonghua （manderin), to get used to the northern diet, customs., way of living; learning to become more composed instead of intense self-awareness among sophisticated classmates most of whom come from urban well-to-do families. Many nights I sat by the beautiful pond on campus to contemplate my past life at the age of 18, the so-called budding age,  hoping to sort through my life, finding a solution to dilemmas seeming insurmountable then. I thought contemplating often a virtue then.  Didn’t Confucius say ” I reflect on my behavior and thoughts three times every single day “?

Yes, it is healthy to reflect regularly on one’s behavior, situation, and issues. However, when you run into a difficult situation, this self-reflecting often goes in rounds and rounds: you analyze the situation again and again in futile and could not see the light at the end of the tunnel, as a cat chases its tail till exhaustion. Contemplating became obsessive ruminating.  And， rumination can sweep you into a whirlwind of an emotional tsunami.  I came to realize this only after having run into many more obstacles in my life than those at the tender age of 18.  Talking to a friend may mollify the anxiety,  but if you repeat the narratives to many different people around you,  it will do you no good. Every time you narrate, you let the neurons underlying this type of negative emotion fired on and on, so the negative emotion will not have a chance to subside. On the opposite, it will take an even stronger hold of you and prevent you from feeling OK again. Sound decisions ad the right actions will not emerge under strong emotions.

It is difficult to quickly tame a  negative emotion. Actually, it is the opposite, the eager we are to control it, the stronger it becomes. Even if we were able to control it, we may merely manage to suppress it temporarily,  for it will reemerge later on.  Take strong negative emotion as the mud swirling inside a fish tank. To get the mud to sink to the bottom of the tank so you can have a clear view of the fish, the last thing you want to do is to submerge your hands in the muddy water and try to push the mud to the bottom. The more you try to push it down, the more you churn it up. Similarly, attempting to control a negative emotion, you may try to push it down. Unfortunately, the harder you try, the more it resurfaces. The best solution is to slow down and perhaps write your thoughts down and dump them on a piece of paper or type them into a Word file.  we have to separate the raw energy of negative emotions from linguistic labels like “anger” or “hatred” and then witness it calmly until the negative emotion morphs into something else. What is important here is not to get attached to words like “anger,” “hatred,” and “jealousy,” and instead to witness the raw emotional energy behind the labels. Although it may be subtle, the energy constantly changes while the label remains static. If you peel the label off and get in touch with the raw energy, you soon realize that the negative emotion is only temporary, one that changes without your conscious effort. Therefore, much like a mirror reflecting what is before it without judgment or identification with the image, simply reflect the negative emotion—let’s say it’s anger—and watch it dispassionately. You will see that anger slowly changes shape, either revealing a deeper layer of emotion or dissipating on its own. If another layer of emotion is revealing itself, attend to it the way you just did with the first layer.

When a predicament in your life triggers a negative emotion, you can calmly deal with the predicament only after the negative emotion recedes. Then, you can analyze the situations:  those you can do something about, and those out of your hands. Take actions on those you have control of or influence, and let nature take its course on those you have no control of.