Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.
— Rollo May, The Courage to Create
The table conversations at The Burkhart Center’s latest “Love and a Coffee Revolution” were people truly “braving the wilderness” of sharing vulnerability and particularly seeking ways to address the strong emotional responses both women and men are having these days in relation to the seemingly endless series of affronts faced by so many [minority] peoples in our nation, including many of the women in that room and throughout our country. So, powerful feelings of anger and hatred, loss and grief, deficiency and powerlessness, desire and longing are being released into hearts and bodies and souls.
What often comes to me in the midst of similar conversations is my shorthand mantra for the words of Rollo May quoted above, that “Freedom is the pause between stimulus and response.” It describes the recognition that our personal freedom comes in the amount of “lag-time” we are able to maintain between whatever is arousing these deep emotions and our response of acting out, discharging or avoiding these powerful feelings. This “pause” between stimulus and response offers the opportunity to fully embrace and experience—and explore—our deep emotions. If we have the time and sacred space for this exploration, particularly within a trusted community, we might discover that these feelings are the gateway to uncovering essential or “divine” aspects that have been walled off or dammed up.
Emotions can point to where Essence has been lost.
One of the key concepts in the Diamond Approach Work is “the theory of holes,” describing how the loss of contact with our Essential nature and qualities creates a vacuum that various feelings, personality characteristics, self-images and structures seek to “fill in.” These powerful emotional reactions are gateways to discovering these holes, and a step on the pathway to recovering our inherent divine resources and qualities.
So more and more I’ve actually come to celebrate moments when I’m flooded with anger, or sadness, or even helplessness (although I’m still not enamored with that last one). Why? Because these are all evidence of passionate life forces activated within our souls, life forces that have been channeled or structured in certain, usually distorted, ways by our own “holding environments,” life circumstances, personalities, belief systems and societal commands and demands, among other factors.
When I haven’t acted out on or discharged these feelings in one way or another, and even when I have, I can celebrate as well: these emotions demonstrate that my heart can be open and receptive to vulnerability. As Diamond Approach teacher A. H. Almaas says, Some people are not only cut off from their Essence, they are cut off from their emotions, too. This makes them very far from themselves. They have only their thoughts, which are the results of the emotions. . . . [but] Emotions can point to where Essence has been lost.
If we can recognize, first, what a gift these powerful emotions are, we might enter into that pause that is freeing from all these ego-structures. If we are in a supportive environment [ the key word there is “supportive” ] where we can “stay with” the actual felt experience of anger, hurt, sadness, grief, rage, fear, powerlessness, etc., rather than immediately lashing out or lashing in, or discharging in any way, we will be “braving the wilderness,” as Brene Brown writes.
Furthermore, we will be, bit by bit, increasing the capacity of our souls, to enable the possibilities that are our birthright as humans of Being, as A. H. Almaas writes in Inner Journey Home:
The aspects of essence provide the soul with the true inner richness of which she is capable. These aspects give the soul her experience of, and capacity for, all that is precious and desirable for human beings and their life: love, sweetness, warmth, friendliness, kindness, will, steadfastness, commitment, contact, personalness, humanness, gentleness, subtlety, refinement, openness, curiosity, happiness, enjoyment, exquisiteness, balance, courage, justice, detachment, objectivity, precision, spaciousness, expansion, depth, capacity, initiative, passion, fulfillment, satisfaction, contentment, nourishment, generosity, even individuation, identity and existence.
Such freedom begins simply as a “pause between stimulus and response.”
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Rev. David Hett is the Spiritual Director of The Burkhart Center
