Be Like a Babe

Last night while standing outside in below freezing temperatures, I heard a young child crying in a nearby apartment. The cry was of the sobbing variety exuding a baby like desperation to be heard, felt, and fixed, without the ability to describe exactly what was wrong. Beyond the physio-motional inner clench captivating the mother within, the sound of the cry softened my edges enough to a crack a smile through the bitter cold. I relished in this experience of such uninhibited emotion. It is such an act of honesty to let the feelings fly, but as adults, we have to be cautious, or so we’re taught, of where the spark land as to not burn holes in the homes of our relating. Such caution, and pre-conditioned states of repressed expression, billow into our revealing outlets of identity like a heavy fog leaving us vertiginous and fearful of choking in the swampy, stagnant mess of our feelings. Although due ‘caution’ is necessary when embodying and expressing colorful feelings, I think the word mindfulness is a more appropriate term to approach such an implied sense of care. The word ‘Caution’ is crawling with fear and inches forward in the world with a constrained tip-toeing like action. Fear demolishes the sanctuary of safety required before one is able to let loose with full attention to their authentic budding interior aching toward an external bloom.

In our caution and concern for others (manifesting many times as a fear that ‘others’ will judge or solidify us), we tend to stifle strong feelings, leaving our minds, bodies, and spirits off kilter with the unforgiving responsibility to choke down a substance not designed to be swallowed. These welling emotions, from sadness to despair, annoyance to anger, and glee to ecstatic joy, naturally pour from the within to the without. For the world, within itself, out pours its circumstantial wheeling evocations, spinning us without the necessary means to maintain a hold on all the centrifugal physio-motional responses triggered within. The impulse is to cry, scream, shout; release that which has poured in out, back into the world as an effected form with enough difference, and enough umph to keep the wheel of life favorably evolving with the revolutions which determine growth. Undue caution presupposes that big emotions are unattractive, irresponsible, and immature, especially now that language has been learned, we are expected to use it to talk our way ‘down,’ and ‘out’ of emotions to be in an “ideal” state of calm level-headedness. I feel that assumption will do just that… flatten the personality leaving the individual “down and out”: buried underneath the masks of what is ushered as acceptable and out-side of themselves to a degree that positions them helpless in relating, or assisting themselves or others in any meaningful, embodied way.

Such representations of dealing with the emotions steeping within, alienates us from the very emotional sense which allows appropriate relating to take place at all. The act of caring stems from the essence of love which sets in motion the emotional body to feel, in-turn being cognitively motivated and able to reach out and touch the world, or feel the world touch back. To use other words, I care enough to not punch you in the face if I am feeling angry because I love you, and although deep down I have an awareness that I am love, I forget and still have the desire to be in love and when I do something mindless or stupid, or someone apparently does something to me which is mindless or stupid, or the universe puts seemingly too many weights upon me, my emotional body is triggered into anger for being illusory taken from that love. I love, I feel, I care. Hence the concern to not take it out on others, or blow it out into narcissist proportions while playing the victim. So again, the tendency is to stifle, repress, and neglect the emotion leaving it brewing to an even more potent and potentially dangerous fermented substance until we cycle into contact with the straw that brakes us apart. Because we will cycle toward contact with that feeling again. What gets poured in must be poured out.

Instead of “caution” while navigating emotion, let us turn toward discretion. Discernment aligns us with our sense of intelligence of both mind and heart, bringing us to a state of connected awareness, of mindfulness, which searches for and locates the appropriate channels to release said emotion. When one is mindful of their surroundings and present in their body in order to fully engage with the emotion seeking attention, then the appropriate channel for full whole-hearted expression will manifest as though by some force of magic or miracle. An undisclosed Hermeticist once wrote about miracles, “...there is no freedom outside of the miraculous and that man is man only in so far as he lives from the miracle, through the miracle and for the miracle.” So what of human agency? Of mindfulness? “and I repeat, one only does miracles, and all that is done is a miracle, and nothing is done without it being a miracle. All that which is not a miracle is not really done- it happens, as part of automatic functioning.”* As for our ingrained reactions to emotions, whether they are approached by a learned sense of stifling that becomes habitual, or through an abusive flippant uncontrollable explosion, the emotional “intelligence,” more suitable labeled “ignorance” in this case, becomes an automatic process, negating the miraculous. It is only through an act of function, or doing, as in the state of mindfulness, which occupies the pathways of unconscious automatism’s and allows the miracle to manifest itself as the means for creative relief.

Since we have touched on the topic of the miraculous, allow me further this exploration of emotional responses by suggesting that the uninhabited present expression of emotion, once thought to be immature, self-serving, irresponsible, and unattractive, may in fact, produce the exact opposite effect. Staying with a strong current of feeling, while employing the practice of discernment to appropriately release emotion, either through movement, speech, art, or via the face distorting sobs of a baby, may in fact be the very medicine those in which you are in present relation with need. Their medicine is your authenticity. I do not discern here between what is being related to, for I don’t see a difference, or value one over the other. For instance, I can be standing isolated in an empty snowy field, their may be no detectable movement or sound around me, but if I am feeling tears well within me and want to kick puffs of white into the air and moan my head back into the sky, I am being authentic to the dimensions of the place of my relation. By not holding back I create ripples in the environment. I produce the “effected form” of the circumstances that lead me to that feeling, and offer it into the world: to keep the wheel spinning. The unnoticed birds in the tree fly up in response, hang over my head and I receive a relief I may only understand in dreams, but for now: relief. If the object of relation is another human, then perhaps the presentation of sensation is all they need to unleash the fragmented, dis-located deep motives of their own emotional purposes. This is evolution we are talking about, the “Emotional Kindness of Being.”** When we resolve to evolve, we produce…another revolution.

*Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism. Trans. Robert Powell. New York: Putnam, 1985.

**”The emotional kindness of being” was something I received while mediating and giving my devotional gift of attention to Pulsatilla, commonly known as Pasque or Wind Flower. The plant spirits graceful passion and energetic healings have helped clear me for receiving and being with my emotions in a more comprehensive, creative way. I owe any insights into the development of this piece to Pulsatilla and her infinite emotional wisdom.