Embracing and honoring the not-nice.

Mequitta Ahuja, The Italy Drawings 2014

The psycho-spiritual imperative to embrace, honor, and move through negative feeling states

The concept of spiritual bypassing has risen to the surface in the collective. Originally introduced by Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist John Welwood in the 1980’s, a spiritual bypass or spiritual bypassing is a tendency to use “spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal, emotional ‘unfinished business,’ to shore up a shaky sense of self, or to belittle basic needs, feelings, and developmental tasks.”

We can’t just skip over the ugly or uninteresting or uncomfortable parts. But in practice, we do.

For those who use spiritual bypassing—or any other means—to avoid fear or discomfort or the process of feeling negative emotions, it is essentially a skipping over of the psychological and emotional growing pains of life and our experience on this earthly plane. But the psychological and emotional experience of the ugly, the distressing, the uncomfortable, the hard-to-bear, the not-nice, the scary—the experience of these states and emotions is necessary not only for growth but for the experience of one’s full humanity and authentic wholeness and sovereignty.

We cannot achieve spiritual growth, or any kind of growth, without coming into intimate connection with the darker side of the psyche and the negative feeling states associated with anger, aggression, loss, fear, disgust, anguish, contempt, resentment, jealousy, rage.

Denial and repression are excellent and effective mechanisms for the avoidance of unpleasant emotional and psychological material. But there exists a psycho-spiritual imperative for not only experiencing but embracing, honoring, and somatically moving through negative feeling states. We must court these feeling states and wait with them as they unfold. They will present us with the lessons we are here to learn, especially those around full expression, somatic presence, complete psychic empowerment and self-ownership.

These feeling states carry immense psychic power. Learning that one has access to the power of these negative feeling states is an awakening. And the intensity can be frightening. But in the psychic bath of the intensity, we are birthing something; often, a new version of ourselves.

Many have yet to cultivate a relationship with aggression. Many have yet to cultivate a relationship with the body. Many have yet to cultivate a relationship to the part of the self that is jealous, resentful, bitter, disgusted, disgusting, afraid, raging.

This is a mistake.

It is imperative that we come to have access to aggression and ferocity and full embodiment and fear and trepidation and deep inconsolable whole-body grief and longing and anguish.

Coming into relationship with the power that lies inherent in this side of the human experience is astounding and astonishingly healing.

Anger (in the manner of righteous anger).

Anger is a response to an insult, an injury, or a piercing of the boundaries of the self. It is an expression of presence. An “I’m here and I felt that” warning shot. It is a response to real or perceived injustice. And it must be worked. It must be felt. It must move through the body with acknowledgement. It must be befriended. It must be understood. There must be an acknowledgement of the piercing. And there must be a realization that one matters. One’s existence matters. One’s experience matters. One has importance in the world.

Aggression (in the manner of healthy aggression).

Aggression is lost on many in our modern culture. Aggression is the impulse, the instinct, the intuition to act outwardly in a bold way. From the Latin for approach or attack, aggression is a self-protective impulse. It’s also a biological imperative as mammals. It’s completely taboo in polite circles to behave aggressively, especially physically. But its part of being wholly human. Having access to psychic aggression when necessary is paramount for psycho-spiritual growth and full empowerment. Full empowerment means taking full responsibility for one’s power and agency in the world as an autonomous being. And the state of full empowerment is worth seeking.

Ferocity (in the manner of a mountain lion mama).

Extremely powerful or destructive. Fierce. Ferocity is the swift delivery of an unmistakable message. Don’t you ever do that again. Associated with the animal kingdom, it is part of the emotional landscape in situations that instinctively call for it. Having access to ferocity is expansive and inflating. The ego grows. And in some cases, that is so important and so helpful. Better to inflate through justified ferocity and come back down to earth rather than not experience the surge and swiftness of animalistic power and force. We do best to maintain access to our ferocity for when it is needed. It is not a vestigial appendage to be discarded. It must be honored, revered, and respected. It must be seen as a part of the human condition—as one possibility out of many for acting with agency in the world.

Rage. Jealously. Resentment. Bitterness. Disgust. Contempt. Fear. Grief. Anguish. Each of these deserves our full understanding and being with. For example, rage is well-understood and guttural. To express rage and to embrace it is not hard to imagine. But what would be the experience of expressing and embracing fear or the full spectrum of grief? Our culture represses these feeling states with great success. Its our responsibility to recover access to these dissociated and cut-off aspects of the human experience.

The best way to work with negative feeling states is to approach them as one would approach an untamed animal. With careful observation. With curiosity. And with a desire to help and heal. With that foundation, one can begin to embrace and hold the feeling state. One can be with it. One can come to know it.

There is so much richness here for exploration. It is worth it to plumb the depths of these emotions for meaning and associations. We must not deny or repress these universal human experiences simply because they are unseemly or impolite. To do so is to cut off a whole side of human experience and to hold in contempt the “not-love and the not-light.”

The Authentic Wholeness self development program or the Authentic Wholeness Coach Certification program goes into the honoring of our emotional states in great depth.

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A Poem for Women in Rage by Audre Lorde, 1981

A killing summer heat wraps up the city

emptied of all who are not bound to stay

a black woman waits for a white woman

leans against the railing in the Upper West Side street

at intermission

the distant sounds of Broadway dim to lulling

until I can hear the voice of sparrows

like a promise I await

the woman I love

our slice of time

a place beyond the city's pain.

In the corner phone booth a woman

glassed in by reflections of the street between us

her white face dangles

a tapestry of disasters seen

through a veneer of order

mouth drawn like an ill-used road map

to eyes without core, a bottled heart

impeccable credentials of old pain.

The veneer cracks open

she lurches through the glaze into my afternoon

our eyes touch like hot wire

and the street snaps into nightmare

a woman with white eyes is clutching

a bottle of Fleischman's gin

is fumbling at her waistband

is pulling a butcher knife from her ragged pants

her hand arcs backward "You Black Bitch!"

the heavy blade spins out toward me

slow motion

years of fury surge upward like a wall

and I do not hear it

clatter to the pavement at my feet.

Gears of ancient nightmare churn

swift in familiar dread and silence

but this time I am awake, released

I smile. Now. This time is my turn.

I bend to the knife my ears blood-drumming

across the street my lover's voice

the only moving sound within white heat

"Don't touch it!"

I straighten, weaken, then start down again

hungry for resolution

simple as anger and so close at hand

my fingers reach for the familiar blade

the known grip of wood against my palm

for I have held it to the whetstone

a thousand nights for this

escorting fury through my sleep

like a cherished friend

to wake in the stink of rage

beside the sleep-white face of love.

The keen steel of a dreamt knife

sparks honed from the whetted edge with a tortured shriek

between my lover's voice and the grey spinning

a choice of pain or fury

slashing across judgment like a crimson scar

I could open her up to my anger

with a point sharpened upon love.

In the deathland my lover's voice

fades

like the roar of a train derailed

on the other side of a river

every white woman's face I love

and distrust is upon it

eating green grapes from a paper bag

marking yellow exam-books tucked into a manila folder

orderly as the last thought before death

I throw the switch.

Through screams

of crumpled steel

I search the wreckage for a ticket of hatred

my lover's voice

calling

a knife at her throat.

In this steaming aisle of the dead

I am weeping

to learn the names of those streets

my feet have worn thin with running

and why they will never serve me

nor ever lead me home.

"Don't touch it!" she cries

I straighten myself

in confusion

a drunken woman is running away

down the West Side street

my lover's voice moves

a shadowy clearing.

Corralled in fantasy

the woman with white eyes has vanished

to become her own nightmare

and a french butcher blade hangs in my house

love's token

I remember this knife

it carves its message into my sleeping

she only read its warning

written upon my face.