Most of what we try to manage in life is an emotional reality. We manage ourselves to avoid heartbreak when a lover leaves, to avoid feeling like a failure when a boss is angry. But the management itself — the suppression, the muscular holding, the judging — is what creates suffering, not the emotion.
When emotions are unresisted, they change rapidly. No one has ever been killed or maimed by an internal emotion. But through the slow process of managing and suppressing emotions, we can kill ourselves with stress and depression. The resistance to the emotion is painful; the emotion itself is simply a physical sensation with varying intensities.
“Stop resisting them. A lot of the things about emotional states that we find out is that it is the resistance to them that’s painful, not the actual emotion itself.”
Non-management of emotions doesn’t mean acting them out — throwing temper tantrums or tennis rackets. It means allowing yourself to feel them fully without trying to push them down, repress them, hold your muscles against them, or judge others to avoid feeling them. This is far more productive for changing life patterns than all the self-management in the world.
Related Concepts
- Discomfort is the resistance, not the emotion
- Resistance changes the emotion
- Being with emotions beats fixing them
- Management communicates distrust
- Emotional management is an internal war with yourself
- Resisting an emotion creates the very outcome you fear
- Resisting an emotion is exactly what invites it back
- Unfelt emotions create physical stress through muscle tension