I hope you’ve had some opportunities to practice with anger and anxiety from the last two classes. I also hope you’ve found benefit from resourcing and grounding yourself, and noticing what else is happening before attending to the felt experience of a difficult emotion.
We’re going to keep building on our skills—this time with a focus on longing or wanting or desire. For some of us, that might not be a difficult emotion; but for me it really is. I have a hard time with wanting. It feels like an incredibly vulnerable emotion. If I want something then I’ve opened myself up to the chance I’ll be disappointed. I may not get what I want. And in so many situations, I don’t have control over the outcome. In fact, in some situations it’s impossible to get what I want—for example, when something has been lost or I want something impermanent to stick around.
So to me, longing is a vulnerable emotion; but it’s also very important. Wanting is connected to our fundamental life energy: it directs us toward what we want in the world—where we want to go, what we value, what we want to create. Of course, longing can…
