Father Richard Rohr describes the necessity of attending to our emotions while not clinging to them. You may also find his reflection on how the Twelve Steps address our Stinking Thinking helpful.
Emotions are necessary weathervanes, in great part body-based, that help us read situations quickly and perhaps in depth. But they are also learned and practiced neural responses, often ego-based, which have little to do with objective reality and much more to do with the storylines that we have learned and created. Our separate self loves to hold onto such emotions to justify and defend itself and assert its power.
Much of the work of emotional maturity is learning to distinguish between emotions that give us a helpful message about ourselves or situations and emotions that are merely narcissistic reactions to the moment. I dare to say that, until we have found our spiritual center and ground, most of our emotional responses are usually too self-referential to be helpful or truthful. They read the moment as if the “I,” with its immediate needs and hurts, is a reference point for objective truth. It isn’t. The small, defensive “I” cannot hold that space. Only Reality/God/Creation holds that space.
Naming any emotion, even if it is negative, as a “sin” is not useful, because guilt and shame, or any sense that “God is upset” with us, usually only increases our negativity and fear—which causes us to close down all the more. In other words, when we try to shut them down, our emotions become more complex, more conflicted, more repressed—and thus less honest “reflections” of reality. If an emotion does not help us read the situation better and more truthfully, we must release it, let it move through us—for our own advantage.
Most of us are naturally good at attachment, but few of us have training in detachment or letting go. Practicing detachment is one of the great tasks of any healthy spirituality, but, when carried to extreme, it’s counterproductive. We must take the risk of legitimate attachment (fully feeling the emotion), learn its important message, and then have the presence and purpose to detach from that fascinating emotion after it has done its work. This is the gift and power of an emotionally mature person. [1]
To be truly conscious, we must step back from our compulsive identification with our unquestioned attachment to our isolated selves—the primary illusion. Pure consciousness is never just me, trapped inside my self. Rather, it is an observing of “me” from a distance—from the viewing platform kindly offered by God which we call the Indwelling Spirit. Then we see with eyes much larger and other than our own.
Most of us do not understand this awareness because we are totally identified with our passing thoughts, feelings, and compulsive patterns of perception. We have no proper distance from ourselves, which ironically would allow us to see our radical connectedness with everything else. Such radical connectedness is holiness. [2]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, introduction to ONEING 6, no. 1, Anger (2018): 13–15. Available in PDF download.
[2] Richard Rohr, Just This (CAC Publishing, 2017), 53.