Reiki Help Blog :: Oasis Reiki Dojo

© Pamir Kiciman 2010

The paradox of human emotion is that it both enriches life by accessing a wide range of experiences, and can also be a merciless trap. We’re not robots. Our capacity for love, happiness, excitement, really anything that makes the heart swell and sparks the mind is cherished. At the same time, not all emotions are pleasant and even the ones that are can limit us. In the two previous posts regarding this (I & II) the specific distinction was made between an emotion and the human ability to feel. While these are used synonymously by everyone including many experts, the truth of the matter is that feeling is what allows us to experience an emotion which is the ‘color’ or ‘flavor’ of the feeling state. Emotion is what bubbles to the surface from an ocean of feeling.

This ocean of feeling is a truer source and we’re built to tap it. It’s a spiritual resource, not merely mental or emotional. Emotions don’t reach a state like peace, not fully. Peace is a feeling, a higher feeling if you will. Peace, balance, compassion, unity… these are ‘spiritual’ feelings or states that we can experience beyond relating to life emotionally. They are feeling states.

Unless there’s emotional healing, higher feeling states are elusive or inconsistent, or even dangerous as it may add to our imbalance. For instance, Love simply is. It existed before we did. It’s one of those feeling states that emotions can get in the way of. It’s a tragicomedy how so many cling stubbornly and painfully to emotions. Feelings are abiding, they’re built into the matrix of life. Emotions are what advertisers play with.

A feeling is fluid, it’s alive, it’s dynamic, it actually helps us when we tune into it or go deeply into it, it actually helps us connect with ourselves more deeply.

Emotion tends to be going outwards, like in seeking some sort of external expression. That’s why it’s called “e”motion, “e” here is short for Latin ex, which means out of some motion, out of, it’s motion taking us out of ourselves. — John Welwood

What is emotional healing? Primarily, it’s living without resentment and trauma tied to the past, that today triggers behavior and emotions negatively impacting you and those around you. Is it possible to be emotionally healed? Yes! The value of emotional healing is that it harmonizes your relationship with yourself and others. It gives you a sense of confidence and self-esteem so you can function well in the world, and be free of mental and emotional afflictions.

Once this is established, other levels of being open up. There’s the emotional heart and the spiritual Heart. The emotional heart has to right itself before the endless horizon of the spiritual Heart becomes available. A wounded ‘little’ heart can’t even consider the possibilities of Big Heart. Wounds obscure and keep you in the throes of unproductive patterns.

For now, this discussion comes to an end with some excellent writing on the subject by Sally Kempton:

Emotions become problematic only when you identify with them, when you get lost or stuck in them, when you privilege certain emotions and try to deny others. The Tantric attitude toward emotions—acceptance, openness to feeling, combined with the awareness of being a spectator—is really a quality of heart. It takes a certain receptivity and softness.

I’ve used a certain practice for years to cultivate that soft-hearted state of witness. It comes fom the late French spiritual teacher, Jean Klein. Instead of being simply the observer of thoughts and feelings, you consciously welcome them as guests. Anger comes up and you think, “I welcome you.” A beautiful feeling arises: “I welcome you.” […]

Surfing your emotions is possible only after you have cultivated some degree of separation from them, which requires you to have a built-in recognition that you aren’t just your emotions.

Contemporary yogic and Buddhist teachers offer a quiverful of strategies for interrupting the tendency to identify with thoughts and emotions. Basic mindfulness is one. Another is the process of recognizing and challenging the stories and beliefs that you hold about reality. Another, very powerful, practice comes from the devotional traditions and involves offering or turning your emotions to God. Instead of blocking emotion, you use your feeling states to give juice to your practice. There are examples of this in all the devotional traditions—mystical Christianity, Judaism, Sufism, and especially in the bhakti tradition of India.

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Emotions are a part of life and the human experience. Emotions accompany us through life. A new color palette is given to us by our emotional nature. As stated in the previous post on this subject, feeling capability is more significant than an emotion itself, but certainly the range of human emotion is a valuable human attribute. The question that remains is: Do you stay within the confines of an afflictive emotion, or strive for the meta state of feeling with all its possibilities? The short answer is, both.

There’s validity to work with an afflictive emotion directly. Most of us are in serious need of emotional healing. It seems emotions, though unique to humans (in the fullest sense), are difficult for us. We’re in hot water when it comes to emotions. One way to get out of hot water, or at least make it lukewarm, is to work with an afflictive emotion directly, to face it, understand it and make friends with it.

There are many methodologies for this. This discussion is about the intricacies of actually doing so, not the how. Disallowing the emotion, ignoring it, coating it with something else, or replacing it is avoidance, a form of denial. One major element of emotion is that it provides feedback. We don’t want to miss out on that! An emotion is a field of information. Negative or difficult emotions, perhaps more so. Afterall, we don’t probe happiness a whole lot. But anger or sadness holds the potential to yield layers of self-awareness.

© Pamir Kiciman 2010

“Afflictive” means that which brings harm or suffering. As long as it’s done with awareness, it can be revealing and healing to stay a while with such an emotion. Stay with it an hour or a day, knowing full well you’re allowing this to happen, that it’s a learning experience. Of course there are times when the emotion is utterly dominant, awareness is subdued, and there are behaviors and associated dynamics that keep you in the grips of an emotion. In such a situation you extract yourself as soon as possible and put the light of awareness on the experience.

Hopefully, your relationship with awareness is strong enough that the spiral down into the goo of an emotion doesn’t occur. And we’re working from a premise that you’ve healed emotionally to a considerable degree. Emotional wellness is a threshold state. It launches the next stages of personal and spiritual growth. If you’re relating to life from the ‘drama’ of emotion, then awareness hasn’t been freed up enough to give you any kind of perspective.

If, however, your emotional heart is in a more wholed state and self-awareness is a routine part of your daily consciousness, then when difficult emotions arise (they still do and will), you can go with it. This allows you to feel what you’re feeling and see what it may teach you. It’s also one way to prevent what’s called ‘spiritual bypassing’ where rather than deal with it, you go around or over it and reach some kind of ‘better’ feeling, while the original emotion festers and will surface again, sometimes in explosive ways.

Emotions add color and variance to life, but they can also land us in hot water. How long and in what manner we dwell in an emotion is a key factor. Since there’s a lot of subtlety involved, this subject will be continued in several more posts…

All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you. — Rainer Maria Rilke

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© Pamir Kiciman 2010

This was the topic of the monthly dojo meeting I have with Reiki practitioners I’ve trained. Here are the salient points.

Humans have the unique ability to experience emotions. We think that because we have an emotional capacity, it has to be like a faucet that’s constantly on. Just because we have this ability doesn’t mean we have to be constantly emoting! The opposite also happens: emotions get shut off, like a faucet which is rusted and stuck. Emotions both delight and scare us. Some equate emotion with peak experience. Some are victim to their emotional nature. And some keep emotion firmly in lockdown.

Emotions are valuable. They are a large part of what makes us human, and they can enhance life experience, as well as provide helpful feedback. The trouble is, we indulge emotions too long too, often and turn the whole thing into a command performance for a drama award. We must learn the fundamental difference between ‘having an emotion’ and our capacity to feel.

Being able to feel is the real attribute that gives life to our emotional nature. Emotions themselves aren’t as important as our ability to feel. Sadness is an emotion we don’t necessarily want. Sadness can be turned into a happy feeling. Thus it’s our feeling capacity we must prioritize. Being able to have an emotion isn’t sourced in the emotion; it’s sourced in our ability to feel. Sadness and happiness are emotions on a continuous stream of feeling. We like happiness and don’t like sadness. It’s skillfulness in feeling which facilitates the transition from one to the other.

Our feeling nature is an intuitive faculty. It comes from a part of us that’s not limited to spacetime. What’s behind our feeling ability? Awareness. Just like feeling ability is behind emotion, awareness is behind our ability to feel. Without awareness we’d be automatons. There are degrees of awareness. To increase our degree of awareness, emotional healing is usually needed. We all have wounds that need healing. Unless this work is done, emotions continue to trap us in their ongoing cycle of charge and reactivity.

Once we make whole emotional wounds, other levels of awareness open up. The emotional heart must be made whole before the spiritual heart becomes available and real. On one end of the emotional spectrum we remain in churning waters, unable to escape. On the other end, we’re happy, even exulted. Beyond either is a whole range of uncaused feeling.

Peace is such an uncaused feeling. It’s sourceless. It certainly doesn’t come from the emotional heart, or the human mind. Peace is simply there. We can access peace, feel it and embody it. We want to be clear and available enough in our emotional heart, so as to feel the peace that’s constantly beckoning us. Peace is a feeling state. It’s a state of being. States of being don’t become part of our experience when there’s still a lot of emotional crud to disperse, or we operate only at an emotional level, without knowledge of the whole range.

‘Emotion’ and ‘feeling’ aren’t synonymous. Feeling is a spiritual faculty sourced in self-reflective awareness. Awareness and its ‘tools’ lead to healing, as well as point to uncaused states such as peace or joy which inspire and propel our personal evolution.

continued →

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Heart Light
© Pamir Kiciman 2010
Click to view full-size

We are a community of men, women and children.
We live, breathe and exist together in our community.
Our community is our home, even though we also have a roof over our own family.
Gathered under such roofs, we form neighborhoods.
We leave our neighborhood in the morning and return to it in the evening.
What is good for us is good for the community.
To protect our own is to protect the community.
What is best for the family is equally good for the community.

We are fond of boundaries.
Me, myself, my family, home, country.
My goods and future.
My health. My food. My money.
My beliefs and views.
Me. Mine. My own.

It’s natural to love one’s own.
It’s natural to shelter one’s own.
It’s natural to care more about your own.

Then again, we fight with our families and ourselves more often than with others.

Community is inside as well as outside.
Community is a state of mind.

Our state of mind is our first community.
It’s from our mind and heart that we decide how much to blame others.
Blame others for our own troubles.
If in our heart and mind we would find peace, we would find peace in our relationship with all people.

Relationship is a fact of life.
There are those we want to be with and those we have to be with.
We are in relation with others in many ways.
Our thoughts, feelings, needs, money, beliefs, views put us in touch with others.
These others are individuals, and groups of individuals that function as companies, institutions and governments.
There is a web of life. The stranger we see at the bank has similar relations.

We also share the web of life with Nature and its lifeforms.

The tree’s shade and a pet’s warmth are cherished. Wheat and oranges nourish us.
We relax and play at the beach. The web exists so that life works.

Are you ever angry at an apple you enjoy?

What makes us angry with people whether they are those we want to be with or those we have to be with?

Anger disappears when we share instead of hoard.
Anger disappears when we see that our family is similar to another’s family.
Anger disappears when we notice that the fruit tree that feeds us, feeds a child whose name we may not even know.
The same cotton that we wear is on someone else’s back, the same material on our feet protects another’s feet,
and the same steel that makes our car makes the neighbor’s car.

The sun shines on us all equally.

Peace appears when we emphasize similarities.
Peace appears when we honor natural variety.
Peace appears when we realize that everyone seeks the love we seek.
Peace appears when we accept that health; happiness and financial security are available to us as a human right and not at the expense of another.
Peace is seen in the web of life when we tell our fear to grow up!

There’s not a single person who doesn’t want the basics of life that we want.
These basics include tangible things as well as success, happiness, health, acknowledgment and fulfillment.
Since we have to participate in life in similar ways to attain similar results, is it not more productive to join efforts?
Is it not more powerful to manifest dreams with collaboration rather than competition?
Who wins when one person or group wins? Only that person or group and everyone else are losers.

Who’s the loser when everyone wins? The obstacles!

Obstacles are created by us and can be uncreated by changing our heart and mind.
For that we simply need willingness and reason.
Reason shows us that cooperation brings results.
Willingness takes us into our heart and mind where we develop flexibility and compassion.
When reason is coupled with forgiveness, we have a winning formula for social and personal success.

Let us remember that the formula of reason plus forgiveness has to be applied by citizen and leader alike.
Afterall, a leader is a citizen and a citizen is a leader.
Those who are elected or rise to prominence in some way are sanctioned as leaders, yet their power is in the hands of the people.

Forgiving leaders paves the path to start afresh.
Leaders returning that trust with sincerity and unwavering commitment, solidify the path.
People taking a real interest and becoming active with the power they have completes the shared responsibility of community.
Then everyone is on the same path, heading to unity and a better life for all.

Pain, grudges, disappointment, injustice, prejudice, lack of opportunity, education or housing, poverty, ill-health as well as all the other challenges of life, and the real solutions for these are the responsibility of every single member of society.

We are the only ones who can bring order to chaos.

We are the only ones who can bring peace to conflict.

We are the only ones who can bring sanity to anger and hatred.

We are the only ones who can correct errors.

We are the only ones who can heal wounds.

We are the only ones who can monitor each other for the good of all.

We are the only ones who can use reason to see that the web of life is inclusive and not exclusive.

We are the only ones who can forgive and move on.

The past keeps us in the past. The future is ours to live. The present is where we act, assert and voice our common vision.

Mother, father, child, business owner, politician, teacher, student, professional and unemployed, WE populate our communities.

We are the only ones who can make it a place worth living.

We are the only ones who can create a new history.

We are the only ones who can…

◊ ◊ ◊

To see more of Pamir’s meaning-making photography, visit his photoblog.

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As promised, more poetry. First some Rumi. It’s so very difficult to select which of his delicious verses to quote. As a true mystic, ecstatic verses poured out of him like a great, surging river. His work is prodigious, and it may surprise you to know he’s America’s best-selling poet, this realized soul who was born in the 13th century!

To help you know him there’s one video embedded here, an excerpt from the PBS film on his life and work (email/rss readers need to click back to the original post to view video), and a link to another one of an interview with the film’s producer/director Haydn Reiss.

The essence of Rumi is pure divine love. He exemplifies poetry as spiritual vehicle and expression. Get to know his work. You’ll never be disappointed and will always leave enriched.

You are Joy!

Oh my God, our intoxicated eyes
Have blurred our vision
Our burdens have been made heavy,
Forgive us.

You are hidden and yet
From east to west you have filled the world with Your radiance
Your Light is more magnificent
Than sunrise or sunset
And you are the inmost ground of consciousness
Revealing the secrets we hold.

You are an explosive force
causing our dammed up rivers to burst forth.

You whose essence is hidden
While Your gifts are manifest
You are like water
and we are like millstones
You are like wind and we are like dust;
The wind is hidden while the dust is plainly seen.
You are the invisible spring
and we are your lush garden
You are the spirit of life,
And we are like hand and foot;
Spirit causes the hand to close and open.

You are intelligence,
And we are your voice
Your intelligence causes this tongue to speak.
You are joy and we are laughter,
For we are the result
of the blessing of Your joy
All our movement is really
A continual profession of faith
Bearing witness to Your eternal power
Just as the powerful turning of the millstone
professes faith in the rivers existence.

Dust settles upon my head and upon my metaphors
For You are beyond anything we could ever think or say
And yet this servant cannot stop trying
to express Your beauty in every moment,
let my soul be Your carpet.

Mathnawi V: 3307-3319

Translated by Kabir and Camille Helminski

Phil Cousineau speaks with filmmaker Haydn Reiss about his award-winning film “Rumi, Poet of the Heart.”

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