As you’re scrolling through your social media, how often do you come across profiles full of quotes on staying positive? There can be the temptation to “keep our head above water and paddle like mad” rather than allowing ourselves to feel the full extent of our emotional range. Thinking that being positive is a better choice can give us the idea that it’s somehow a failing if we don’t eschew the uncomfortable emotions for staying in our “happy place”. Happiness and optimism have their place in our lives, but we lose a great deal of our self-awareness if we exercise too much control over our emotions, preferring one feeling over another.
I often think about my 10-day stay at a Vipassana retreat in 2014, where we were encouraged to feel everything with “equanimity”. That meant accepting ALL the feelings, including rage, grief, fear, boredom, and every little spinal ache and muscle pain from sitting for prolonged periods while practicing Adhiṭṭhāna (determined sitting). This involved not moving a muscle while I observed the intense emotions that such stillness was bound to bring to the surface.
When movement does not disperse the energy, all kinds of feelings and sensations arise. The point is to not attach to the pleasant feelings or fight against the unpleasant ones, with the understanding that all suffering occurs as a result of attachment and aversion. When you can feel all your feelings with equanimity, you are free from the addiction to any particular feeling and the adverse reactions to uncomfortable ones.
According to vipassana, one cannot be addicted to a substance or behaviour, but the feeling that it gives us. In other words, if we cannot accept uncomfortable feelings, we will do whatever it takes to generate and cling to the feelings we want to have.
This is why I see “positive thinking” as merely another way of attaching to a particular type of feeling and suppressing the ones we’ve been conditioned not to tolerate. Eventually, we have to pull up the rug and look at what we’ve hidden underneath it due to whatever conditioning we received from early childhood (example, the grief suppressed from being shamed for crying).