Your Teachings are Hazardous to My Health

Q: We may not be our bodies, but we do live in them. Our bodies are carrying around the energy from our unexpressed feelings. This energy represents a trailmap to issues we will inevitably end up working out throughout our lives.  This energy, unexpressed, will find an outlet, usually in the form of illness, sickness, cancer, and myriad health issues. 

Many of your teachings directly tell people to not pay attention to the feelings, and that feelings are without merit, worthless perhaps, a waste of time. But just like a falling rock will break our bones, a suppressed emotion can destroy our health. Following your advice, a person can realize non-duality or whatever we agree to call it, but their body will still be affected by the consequences of emotions seeking resolution.

Thus, you offer clarity of oneness, accompanied by nearly assured illness and breakdown for the body. I implore you to consider the fact that what you teach regarding emotions can become a fuller teaching.

A: I appreciate your point of view. The message I communicate is certainly not for everyone, but it was so helpful in ending a lifetime of torment for me that I do find myself sharing it enthusiastically.

Your comments seem based around one idea: that I encourage the suppression of emotion, therefore not allowing these emotions to play all the way out and resolve. Nowhere have I ever suggested that anyone suppress an emotion. Quite the contrary, I always say that emotions are free to be whatever they are, and need not be pushed away, suppressed, feared, regretted, or anything of the sort. But I think where you and I differ is that I don’t think emotions need to be paid attention to.

My emotions are always changing. I can’t even keep track. Any attempt on my part of “resolving” an emotion is nothing more than mental yarn-spinning – making up a story, after the fact, trying to make sense of some feeling that came up on its own, for whatever reason. I just don’t bother to do it anymore, because by the time I’ve resolved the feeling (or gotten frustrated and given up), it’s not even there anymore.

In my experience, it was the mental spinning of stories that exhausted the body, and caused it disease and breakdown. The mental spinning of stories was attached to my belief that I was this person who stands to gain and lose all the time. It was very stressful, and interfered with nature’s healing way.

Now, in my life, any emotion can arise, and it is free to be. It is seen, and it passes. A new one arises. Living in the body for me now is more like how an animal lives, reacting naturally to various input, but without creating a story about it.

Certainly, while someone believes they are a body, the best thing they can do is pay attention to their feelings! But I’m not in the business of advising people what to pay attention to if they believe they are a body.