Next, the primary color of sadness.

Cobalt, periwinkle, lavender, azure -- blue too has many, many more permutations of generic blueness. Likewise the emotion sadness can be expressed as grief, dejection, despair, disillusionment, hopelessness, tearfulness, feeling "down" or " blue", disappointment, feeling sorry, despondency, anguish, or melancholy.

Which of these emotional variations of sadness are you familiar with? Which most? In yourself and in others? Be curious and explore the emotion of sadness in yourself and in your own psycho-physical organism. Where do you experience sadness? What types of sadness appear in different parts of your body? What happens when you close your eyes and give these feeling states your full attention? Draw, write, dance, sculpt and in other ways find creative expression to expand you emotional literacy.

In this sensitive work on emotions always be compassionate with yourself, never be judgmental or critical of yourself. Your emotional patterns have a long history and even the most illogical and extreme emotional states make sense when you trace them back to their historical roots in early life. Early life is the time when these patterns originated because that is when you tried to make sense of your emotional experience -- yours and other's.

Next week, we look at the remaining two primary colors of emotion: fear and hurt.

BLOG entry #40

The primary colors of emotion are anger, sadness, fear, and hurt. Anger is very often merely a lid for more authentic emotional states. Anger may appear as resistance (NO!), resentment, or distancing. Sadness may lead to depression or a consistent feeling of melancholy or "heaviness." Fear is commonly experienced in anxiety, nervous behavior, or an underlying feeling that something bad is about to happen (dread). Hurt in a constant sense of neglect, woundedness, or a feeling of not being appreciated.

In spite of the richness of emotional experience that is potential in our psycho-physical organism (the bodymind) many of us have no authentic means of relating to our felt sense or direct experience of emotions. Furthermore, we might not be literate in our ability to express these incredibly diverse feeling states in verbal expression.

The purpose of this BLOG is to give you a leaping-off point for expression and through the expression a fresh new experience of emotions with more vivid intensity. You will also be able to begin to sense and understand how emotions comprise a flow in your body and not merely a static condition.

Let's begin with the first of the primary colors -- Anger.

Raspberry, maroon, rust, salmon -- red has many, many more permutations of its generic redness. Likewise the emotion anger may be expressed as resentment, fury, rage, irritation, annoyance, withdrawal, depression, hate, bitterness, hostility, disgust, dismay, irksomeness, impatience, frustration, or aggravation, among many others.

Play with developing your literacy of these permutations of the feeling state of anger by drawing, dancing, sculpting (perhaps with clay or plasticine), or writing about them. Identify your own expressions of anger, the ones that you habitually experience and demonstrate. Also consider the expressions of anger in those close to you. Some of these permutations of anger will be familiar and vivid to you, others not so much. Work at developing your understanding and emotional literacy in the most creative ways you can find.

Finally, consider what challenges are involved for you in these explorations. Which of these expressions of anger cost you too much now? Which are you ready to release? Which do you no longer wish to tolerate in those close to you? How much of your emotional experience and behavior is reactive and conditioned?

BLOG entry #39

Questioner: Why is control so important to us?

Control is the symptom of delusion. Your ego suffers from this delusion of control. We ask, What do I want to do with my Life? How can I best look after my children? What do I want for my old age? Who do I want to live with and who do I not want to live with? You become a slave to your preferences, your views, your desires. It starts out with you deluding yourself into self-identity, then separation follows, then divisiveness, then alienation, then despair. All along the way you suffer from this delusion of control. You say to yourself, How do I want to live my life? But you can only be happy when you embrace the reality that life is living you.

Try this. Go into the garden or wherever there's some relative calm and sense of nature and peace and start to breathe. Now notice that you think to yourself, I am breathing. This is the scenario you imagine, that you initiate and perform this complex process of respiration, in and out breaths, raising and deflating the chest, sending oxygen to the far corners of the organism. Now instead of this, introduce a new thought that the world is breathing me. Imagine it as if the world were involved in an interchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide with your body, breathing you in and out.

Allow your consciousness to embrace this new thought, this fresh idea, and notice how you begin to expand. Now breathe deeper and allow yourself to extend beyond your personal space into the garden and beyond, and out and out to the far reaches of the horizon and beyond, beyond into outer space and keep going. Every time you feel contractions setting in, simply breathe a little deeper.

Now the universe is breathing you and a new thought, or reality dawns in you from direct experience that there really is no boundary between you and it. Everything out there you have held as separate from you, kept at a distance, seen as not-you, through this vital breath is all you! You are IT.

When you realize this in yourself control has no relevance at all. Control is merely a form of anger predicated on the idea of self-identity.

BLOG entry #37

Questioner: If our nature is happiness, joy even, then why do so many of us feel despair about our suffering?

Richard: Your present suffering is transformed by grace and by grace alone. You sense it. You feel it. You know it intuitively. This is why you feel hopelessness and despair, not because the transformation of suffering is not available or not possible, but because you do not believe in grace. You do not control grace, it is not of your own will and volition or anybody else's, so you do not recognize it or believe in it.

Grace appears to you then as helplessness. Because you can do nothing further there's nowhere to go, nothing to do, so you give in and give up. What a tragedy! If you could just see grace masquerading as despair you would see you just have a little further to go, only a small way and your present suffering is transformed into eternal peace.

BLOG entry #36