Sitting with highly reactive feelings is often a highly somatic experience that most people have no framework for and therefore no means to understand what is happening. It can be a very frightening thing to sit with reactive feelings.
Psychiatry routinely drugs and numbs reactive feelings calling them diseases. People who get labeled as addicts also use substances to numb such feelings. The somatic intensity of emotion is simply overwhelming for a large number of folks and there is little appropriate guidance
What we find when we actually stop and sit with such feelings, is that they cannot harm us and in getting to know them we can actually in time be liberated from acute suffering. Society in general labels intense emotional and somatic experience as disease-something to stop no matter what
Stopping an impulsive action or reactive response necessitates being with the painful, previously intolerable sensations in the body. It is initially a difficult step to make, but as awareness comes it becomes more and more possible.
Compassion for one’s own capacity or lack of capacity to make good “choices” is key to this process that often leads to changing behavior.
The above is an excerpt from another article though I’ve edited it slightly.
Here is a lovely meditation on compassion that a friend shared with me in response to the above:
You can download this meditation from Tara’s website here.
You can find more posts on Everything Matters: Beyond Meds that feature Tara Brach, here.
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