Aversion: Meeting difficult emotions

You’ve woken up feeling a pang of sadness and dread.

It feels intense.

You’ve got other things to do so you try to push it to the side and move on with your day.

After all, you don’t want to feel this way, so best not to wallow in it.

There’s one problem though, what you don’t allow yourself to face and process, usually gets louder.

The fourth of the five kleshas, we now arrive at Dvesa: translated as aversion or avoidance.

Similarly to attachments, aversions keep us locked in a cycle of either pushing away or clinging on to different experiences.

When you are locked into this cycle your energy is bound up in this & you block yourself from being present in the moment.

When you are in this cycle you cannot find stillness, you cannot find peace. Instead you end up consumed by an internal conflict of wanting things to be different.

You can see this most easily when looking at emotions. 

Many of us have an aversion to feeling difficult emotions, this can be particularly difficult when you’re struggling with anxiety, depression or other mental health issues as it can lead you to rejecting your own feelings. 

In doing this you become unable to process them. When you feel sadness or shame arising, you quickly want it to disappear.

Let’s take shame as an example, if you were to feel shame arising within yourself, you could make a resolution to release that sense of shame. 

On the face of it this seems like a great thing.

The problem we run into, however, is that attempts to change or heal don’t work when they’re rooted in the idea that the present moment, what’s arising for you right now, isn’t good enough. 

When you reject the present, rather than allowing it to arise within your awareness without attachment or aversion, you end up bound by it.

In doing this, you also miss the message. When your energy is bound up in pushing away the shame, you miss what this emotion might be trying to communicate. Perhaps there is a part of you that needs your loving care & attention, a memory that needs processing or you simply need time to stop & reevaluate your role within a situation.

So, what can you do when you experience something like this?

First of all, take your time & observe what’s arising. Notice how this feels in the body. Try not to get caught up in the thoughts & stories around it but just sit with how this lands in the body.

This begins to give you the space to consciously respond to what’s arising rather than unconsciously reacting with a habitual pattern.

Next, you can start to explore what’s arising. You might enquire into where this came from, you could visualise it as a person or creature & ask it what message it may be trying to gift you.

Alternatively you could choose to allow in any thoughts, stories, memories & beliefs attached to it & try to observe them all as passing objects within your awareness.

A metaphor I like to use is imagining I was observing a stream with leaves floating down it. Each thought, memory and emotion is a leaf floating down the stream. Watching each leaf as it arrives & passes through your stream of consciousness, trying not to hold onto any one leaf but simply watching them pass. 

I’ll admit, this is much easier said than done, so practise with self compassion, noticing how often your mind drifts into following thoughts, emotions or stories - likely this is a deeply ingrained habit but with practice it will loosen its hold.