QA180 QUESTION: My problem is with positive emotions. I feel very uncomfortable in them. I’m now able to express them much better than before, but I still feel extremely uncomfortable.
ANSWER: It is a very, very fortunate and beautiful thing that you can be at the point where you can acknowledge such a realization, for think how many people find themselves in exactly the same boat, yet are completely oblivious of this fact. In fact, they are convinced that not only is it not true that they are uncomfortable, but also that they want nothing more than having good feelings “if only the world would be different.”
Now, the fact that you know of your personal discomfort about good feelings, you have half the battle. Here is the best answer I can give you at this point as to why and how can you remove this discomfort.
The hook is that to the degree you still enjoy the negative feelings, to that degree you are hooked on them and feel uncomfortable with positive feelings. So your exploration should go in acknowledging how you enjoy, in a certain way, the negative feelings. See that this enjoyment is short-lived and the price is never worth it – because the enjoyment is so short and so precarious and so really undesirable, and the price you pay so enormous.
If you fully see this, you will be able to acknowledge also that you are ready to sacrifice this precarious enjoyment of the negative feelings – of blaming, of resentments, of self-pity. And when you say, “I do not want this, and there is this greater intelligence within me, the power in me, who alone is capable of really helping me shed this – I want this, I’m ready to do this,” then it will happen. Not by force, but somehow, little by little, the reaction of enjoying negative feelings will lessen and to exactly that degree, comfort about good feelings will grow.
QUESTION: I think it’s fear that prevents me from relaxing in these emotions. But it’s a violent fear.
ANSWER: You mean the fear of being comfortable with good feelings? {That’s right} The fear will lessen and lessen until it completely disappears. The correlation, the connecting link, may be somewhere completely different. It may not be a parallel, that the fear of this good feeling has a direct opposite picture in the same area. Not at all!
You may have the fear of pleasure, the fear of good feelings, the fear of loving and of joyousness and of expansion and of freedom and all of this. This fear exists because you may overlook a certain negativity you hold onto with a precarious pleasure and you would really have to want to see this, acknowledge it, and know that this is the price, and be ready to give it up.
That is where you have to look – perhaps somewhere completely different. Ask in meditation to want to be aware where the hookup exists – what negativity you still like and embrace.
QUESTION: [Another person] I have discovered that the reason that I don’t like to have good feelings is because I cannot make other people responsible for my good feelings.
ANSWER: Yes. You see, here you have a very vital clue. As you make others responsible or want to make others responsible for the good feeling and you do not want to assume the self-responsibility for your good feeling, so you must make others responsible for the negative feelings.
You can only take responsibility for your good feeling when you know this is right, that pleasure is allowed, that there is nothing wrong with it, that it is, actually and factually, within the scheme of divine Creation. This knowledge will come only when the pleasure in being negative is given up by recognizing that you derive pleasure and you then do not assume responsibility for it but shift it on someone else.
Use this propitious time for you now by really wanting to see how pleasurable it seems at the moment – although there is much more unpleasure connected with it – to have negative feelings and then blame the other person.
