What does it mean to be spiritually free when life is an emotional roller coaster? Am I free when I’m able to tamp down any emotions that disrupt the flow of my work or relationships? Am I free when I have permission to express any and all emotion? Am I free if I don’t experience any emotion to an extreme degree but keep things more tempered and even? Am I free when I experience mostly the positive emotions such as bliss or peace rather than the negative ones such as anger or anxiety?
What do emotions have to do with spiritual freedom, or do they have anything to do with it?
St. Ignatius of Loyola was a pioneer of sorts in the area of spiritual direction. When he was developing his Spiritual Exercises, he encouraged people to be open to their emotions and to learn how to attend to them and understand what they meant. Ignatius was an ex-soldier and by his own admission had always possessed a strong ego. As a man’s man, he would have been taught to value reason and self-control and rational planning. Yet his own experiences of spiritual awakening introduced him to a deeper awareness of the interior life with all of its facets and nuances.
The Spiritual Exercises encourage full engagement—with the physical senses, with spiritual devotion, with what we would generally call intuition, with deep-down desires, and with any interior “movements,” including emotions. You might say that Ignatius of Loyola was getting in touch with “feminine” qualities centuries before psychologist Carl Jung came along to name and explain them.
I bring up St. Ignatius because interior freedom—spiritual freedom—requires the kind of engagement that is the focus of his Spiritual Exercises. Freedom asks that we learn how to discern our personal interior movements of soul. If we want to be truly free, we will have to acknowledge our emotions, receive them, feel them, and reflect on them. Emotions are powerful tools in the spiritual life; they are indicators of what is happening within us. And if we learn to accept them as gifts in the human experience, we can begin to work with them in spiritually healthy ways.
This week, consider how you have dealt with your emotions—how others taught you to deal with them, how you have in fact worked with them, or how you have avoided working with them. Most of us have lived a combination of engagement and avoidance in the area of emotions. Try to identify your own patterns.
For more on Ignatian discernment, read What’s Your Decision? and God’s Voice Within. Take advantage of special savings on these books by using the promo code Freedom for 25% off. Offer expires 2/29/12.
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My first reaction is just that: a reaction (I’ll fix this in the manner of natural man) and then after the anger hormones are down a bit I remind myself that I have a choice: natural way or divine. The divine way means I can’t fix things the way I’d really like to and I tell God as much (as if he doesn’t already know). Then I ask for help to do it the way I know very well I am supposed to: God’s way. The irony is that I know what I’ll do and how I will end up doing it instead. Funny how my mother commented on that a few decades ago….
I have been busy trying to get caught up with the various articles and posts on “freedom”, spiritual and otherwise.
How do I deal with my emotions? Mostly on my own. I think that I keep most things to myself; including the emotions that I feel arise out of prayer or meditation. It is my way, and it unfortunately has lead me to bursting into tears at times. Not in a weak, girlie way, but just with the pure frustration of not expressing emotion until it is too late. The bucket has overflowed!
Who knows why I am like this – probably afraid of what others may think in the end. I WOULD like to express my emotions more freely.
m.
I have great difficulty I think because of my notions about what others may think of my expressions of these deep feelings and the ideas that spring from them.
m.
Yep. The secret is that everyone is worried about what everyone else thinks. People are so busy looking in their own mirror they don’t see around them — that we actually mirror others. That would be one of those bad spirits (including negative self talk) St. Ignatius talks about.
Key sentence: If we want to be truly free, we will have to acknowledge our emotions, receive them, feel them, and reflect on them.
We need safe places in which to do all of the above — for me, in my blog (people seem willing to limit those comments to supportive ones, on the whole), with my spiritual director(s), and with a VERY FEW friends.
In general, the people I encounter other than as just listed want to insist that I be courageous, be positive, steer clear of the more difficult parts of life. I find that I need to lay it all out there in some forum before I can see the enemy of our human nature hard at work.