QA176 QUESTION: I’m concerned with not being able to cry. I think there must be a very deep pride which prevents me from crying. This afternoon, I was just about to cry and then the feeling just disappeared. Could you help me there?

ANSWER: Yes. It is, of course, pride, on the one hand. But it is also the spite of the child against the parent: “I will not give you the satisfaction.” This is the way you have held together your whole structure as a child. In a way, this was the solution by which you survived psychically, not physically.

But at the same time, what was a psychic survival in childhood turned into a very self-destructive pattern later on. It is very important that you find it so as to give it up, for your whole being says, “I will not give you the satisfaction.” Now, this does not only apply to your pain, which would be expressed in crying, but also to your pleasure.

You know wherever there is a denial of pain, there must be denial of pleasure. You cannot have the one without the other. Now, the pain, the frustration, and the spiteful withholding that you experienced as a child, also withholds the total pleasure that all human beings are potentially capable of experiencing.

This is your structure – and in a way really, of course, also your game. It would be up to you in your further work to become more succinctly aware of this in its subtle manifestations – how you say in many, many forms: “I won’t give you the satisfaction.” Can you connect in any way with this?

QUESTION: Very slightly. Very slightly. If I think of a painful experience from childhood where I had to cry and I held it back, then I can connect with it.

ANSWER: Well, it has stayed in your psychic makeup. It has stayed there, and it has become so much part of you that you are no longer aware of it. You know, this is always the case when one is very much deeply involved with the foreign matter of one’s attitude that seem so like the self that one does not even see it.

But if you do have such recollections, I think it will not be too difficult for you to see the various manifestations. You can also perhaps see it indirectly in certain expressions of the face and certain attitudes you display. I would also suggest that in the first place you can even make certain exercises that bring this out.

Also, in the group in connection with others, you can perhaps think of some situations in which you can express this kind of feeling and, by doing so, you will become more aware that this exists as a very strong part in you. Also the love you withheld originally, out of the same thing.

Since love is pleasure – you cannot think of love without pleasure and pleasure without love – you defeat your pleasure, because you hold back your loving in the same attitude of “I will not give you that satisfaction of my feelings.”

Even anger is difficult to really express for you, although this seems like a strong aggressive emotion, and it is in a sense. But by expressing it, you seem to give someone else the satisfaction that he has the power to make you angry. And you do not want to yield such power. Therefore you imprison yourself in your holding.

QUESTION: But I don’t have any difficulty in expressing my anger.

ANSWER: Oh, on a deeper level you do. You have come to it in a certain way, now. That is progress. But what you have expressed in the past is more an acting out. That is not really knowing how angry you are at the hurt that makes you cry. You cannot want to cry without being angry, in that deeper despair that is there with the crying in you.

QA179 QUESTION: I’ve been on this Path to truth for some time, and I feel very close to a very significant release or an opening. In meditation it comes to me that my work will be in healing, which I desire more than anything else. I recognize that to do any kind of healing, I need to be completely healed myself. I feel that the last kind of barrier or obstruction within me has to do with fear of crying. Many times when I just let it completely go and submerge my ego into a God experience, I nearly always come into a state of just extraordinary visceral tears of crying. I wonder if this may be related to still some childhood reaction in the form of a habit reaction or ought I more openly allow that to happen as a desirable state?

ANSWER: I would put it this way: it is a mixture, my friend. You’re quite right that there are two things. There is, on the one hand, the bliss of letting go, which manifests in soft feelings, gentle feelings, the dissolving feelings. At the same time, there are childhood elements also involved in it.

What I can see here are the following things. Yes, there is childhood hurt there, but I perhaps would say that is not the most significant aspect of it. I would say the most significant aspect of it is the element of healthy aggression that is somewhat trapped or limited or hindered or held in, and there is fear of that in you.

Because also, in connection with the childhood hurts, there is childhood anger. And if this anger isn’t sufficiently assimilated, accepted, coped with, and made aware, then it is held back, and then the healthy aggression is also held back. Therefore there is still a holding. A great deal of this aggression then, in this holding back state, comes up into your body here and dissolves into a crying that is partially the childhood crying, because you do not allow the manhood feeling sufficiently to sweep through your entire being.

There is a fear in that – the fear of male aggression – which is confused very often with unhealthy hostility. Perhaps the hostile feelings have to be dealt with more specifically so that the healthy aggression can manifest, so that you will then dissolve in a total way and the crying will not present a problem. Can you follow me?

QUESTION: Yes, I feel that’s absolutely correct. How do I more effectively deal with the need to be more creatively aggressive? I do fear this.

ANSWER: I would say, first of all, to acknowledge to yourself the really negative feelings of hostility. This is very hard for people who also have a very good will and a great deal of genuine love and a tremendous amount of conscience and who do not want to have feelings of hate and negative aggression and anger – but only when these are faced without feeling one is all bad and all wrong.

When you seek a physical outlet in some form as perhaps our friends here in this group can help you to do, then you will be able to accept these feelings and dissolve them. Then the healthy aggression and self-assertion will give way and will go through your entire being, and be no longer a juxtaposition to the soft and tender feelings, but a oneness.

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