An idea that continues to surface is that emotions are bad. I most often hear it, when people become emotional in a conversation.
It happens when they confuse their emotions with their reactions.
A similar idea that regularly surfaces is that negative thoughts are bad. Sometimes it appears in the way people talk about themselves, or when they criticize someone else and search for ways to make it sound positive.
It happens when they confuse their thoughts with their reactions.
It’s a moment in time in which they find it hard to be themselves. They would prefer to have other emotions or thoughts and can’t accept that what appears to them isn’t good or bad.
Their reaction is an expression of how attached they are to these emotions and thoughts not being theirs. As they identify with these thoughts and emotions they become subject to them.
But actually, it is a very useful and human process. The mind is calling upon our attention. The mind is there to serve our survival. Whenever it senses a danger, it will try to make us aware of it. Therefore, the mind must distract us from wherever the focus has been on what seems to be important. And it does so by generating emotions or thoughts that lead to doubt.
It’s an experience of discomfort. It makes it easy to assume that these emotions or thoughts are bad and to try to suppress them. But it is fighting one of the strongest human mechanisms, one that prefers to warn than to be in danger.
Instead of fighting nature, a more productive approach is to learn to recover from the distraction this mechanism created through the discomfort.
Meditation teaches us such a practice. It starts with an invitation to set a focus, to see thoughts and emotions as they appear and disappear, experience how they distract us from our focus, to then go back to our focus. It doesn’t happen by itself and requires practice. As Novak Djokovic explains, it may take years and a diverse way to work on it. But as he also shares, every time recovery works, may it be slowly or quickly, it becomes easier.
