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Permit Your Heart's Wild Passion

David Deida


Spanking can be an act of closure or openness.

 

 
david deida
For most people at most times, violent emotions are destructive. People fly into rage and say something they don't mean. They may strike out and hurt someone, regretting it later. Or, when hurt by a lover's rejection, they may mope and eat and lay in bed, rotting in the murk of self-destructive depression. Most violence is a form of self-abuse or other-abuse.

Therefore, at first, spiritual growth means cultivating compassion and less emotional violence toward yourself and others. When you begin to grow in self-awareness, you are naturally motivated toward peace and harmony. When upset or riled, you learn to take a few breaths and calm yourself down. You try to exercise kindness rather than hate, acceptance rather than judgment, joy rather than anger.
In this way, you can become harmonious--and eventually bland. Smiling and acquiescent, your depth of love-power can become forfeited for the sake of safe but shallow calmness. You may have grown from irresponsible violence to rehearsed tranquillity, but growth doesn't need to stop there.

After you have developed the capacity to breathe through your emotional reflexes and act graciously, there is another step to take. You can learn to open as your emotion. Rather than striking out in knee-jerk reactivity, and rather than breathing through your anger to achieve calmness, you can actually use anger, or any other emotion, as a doorway to a deeper expression of truth and love.
Remember a time when you wanted to hit someone, punch a wall, break a dish, or hurt yourself. You probably felt trapped--by your own limits or by external constraints--or you felt stuck without love. Violence is always an effort toward greater freedom or love. Openness is freedom and love. Even the most violent or self-destructive emotions are rooted in the heart's need for openness, to be free, to give and receive love.
When you are open, then you are able to give and receive love fully, and you are free. However, when you don't practice to open, when you are unable to live as love, then your love-energy backs up and churns as emotional mayhem. You feel trapped and alone. Your emotional energy careens and jags.
Embraced artfully, intense emotions can be a quick route to deeper openness. Anger can provide you with the sharp thunder necessary to awaken from moody distraction, if you can open your heart and really feel your love-urgency that moves as anger.
Sadness can expose your heart, too. Right now, notice any sadness you may feel. Soften your ribcage and relax your jaw so sadness can swim freely all the way through your chest. Like the ocean, softness is yielding but not weak. Yield to your sadness without collapsing. Feel the swells of sad energy in your chest, the heaves and gasps of yearning, the depth of love in your heart that opens as sadness. To open as sadness is to open as the enormous ocean of love's yearning.

This is part of a chapter from 'Naked Buddhism' by David Deida, vistit his website thru links.

See also: sexual essence, a quiz and: three stages of relating and HotBooks


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