Almost all spiritual teachers preach letting go of what you don’t need and who you are and are not. Less is more. “To be honest,” writes Richard Rohr, “in order to come to grips with the mystery in our heads, our hearts, and yes, our bodies too…that takes an entire lifetime.”
Often those things – the ones we don’t need – are taught or addictive. Life is a great teacher. I had to be chipped away at for decades before I began to come to grips with myself. I just didn’t have enough experience, wasn’t beat up enough, and didn’t see enough of humanity to understand what was happening to me.
When I got little enough, naked enough, and poor enough, I found the truth about myself – the place somewhere beneath my heart where my soul is, the small place where I truly am.
The irony is that a small place is more than enough and all that I need or want. In my head, I was always in a big place, too big to see.
At that place now, suddenly, I have nothing to prove to anyone and nothing to hide from or protect from other people.
The spiritual gurus call this emotional freedom. The less attached I am to myself, the more I can connect with others and their pain, memories, and neediness.
The irrational basis for fear and anger, and hatred crumbles and blows away. The need for hostility and fear as a protection recedes also, and I am free to live.
This is the new phase of spirituality that I am beginning to enter and find: this idea of emotional freedom. It’s a big idea for a shrinking person.
I was worried about so many things that meant nothing that I am free to worry about things that mean something to me and my life.
Richard Rohr: We must go through the stages of feeling,” not only in the last death of anything but in all the earlier, little deaths…So many people learn that the hard way – by suffering from ulcers or depression, finding themselves victim to chronic, irritability or misdirected anger, or by succumbing to all sorts of psychosomatic illnesses – because they refuse to let their emotions run their course, honor them consciously, or find some appropriate place to share them.”
Those are hard lessons but good ones.
My emotions have always been a mystery to me. Without much meditation and contemplation and truth, they would still control me. They still do at times.