Let Go of Emotional Strategies

This is the time of year when friends and family often gather to share holidays. It is the time of year when the ups and downs of life can seem especially potent. It is a good time to reveal to yourself the nature of your emotional strategies, and uncover the deeper One Life Awareness that is who you really are.

There are times you feel good about yourself and times you don’t feel so good about yourself; these are the ups and downs and comings and goings of life as a human. Amidst the ongoing always changing experience of relative existence, emotional strategies appear usually unconsciously. These are the strategies used to try to always feel good, to try to feel loved, and to avoid everything other than “positive” feelings. The strategies take many forms, but have in common the need to prove one’s value and lovability.

“Underneath” all of the strategies, there is steadiness, a reliable emptiness that is always operating exactly as it must, meaning that there's always a sense of reliability even if you cannot name it. This sense doesn't go up and down, or have understanding and then lose it. This sense doesn't question whether people like you or not, whether family is connected to you or not, this sense is not trying to achieve or prove anything. This sense is One Life Awareness. The recognition of emotional strategies as false notions and attempts to identify yourself according to your expectations and beliefs about who you are, while not separate from One Life Awareness, can facilitate a deeper knowing of who you are.

For example, you believe yourself to be a certain kind of person—a spiritual person, an emotionally aware person—but also you can believe that you are unworthy, lacking, or naïve. These beliefs are supported by evidence gathered over the years and develop into important concepts that must be defended and maintained. The defense and the maintenance of ideas about who you are become the foundation of the emotional strategies you employ.
An emotional strategy is used in an attempt to release yourself from discomfort usually. You feel bad about something you said or another said to you, and it keeps coming up for you to examine. The strategy might be to try to disprove whatever you believe, or the strategy might be to try to suppress the whole incident and put it into some imaginary vault somewhere in your consciousness. Eventually you find that every strategy will not work—cannot work—because it is all insubstantial. One concept on top of another idea, held together with strategies and feelings, all of which are not the reliable emptiness that is One Life Awareness.

When you let go of the strategies, knowing without much doubt that they are not necessary or vibrant, when you come to an ease in allowing One Life Awareness to arise in the midst of all of your strategies, you relax into who you are. You are who you are and whatever unfolds around you is exactly what must be, and all is what it is.

We are not promoting some nihilistic or esoteric philosophy, we are suggesting just being who you are, by not getting caught up in judgments and inner soliloquies about who or what you think you are. Just notice that thoughts and emotions and ideas try to get your attention and attach you to a place you assume is stable because it is based on something you believe about yourself. The deeper dive reveals that you cannot live your life trying to achieve happiness, simplicity, joy, or even a sense of being loved. You have to live your life as it is, in the perfection that it is, without any arrogance derived from a belief that you can control anything.

You must be willing to consider that whatever you are experiencing is insignificant—even though you may think that that your experience is incredibly important and worthy of countless hours of examination and analysis. You must also be willing to consider that what you are experiencing is important, not in a self-aggrandizing way, but in the sense that experiencing everything is a part of living life. Holding these two views, that you and your experiences may be insignificant and important simultaneously is another version of the paradox of nothingness and everythingness.  It is the paradox of being nothing and everything without contradiction that allows for incredible freedom. If you get stuck in one polarity or the other you are no longer liberated.

​Just realize that being aware, being present, is the simplest thing you can do. Everything else gets very complicated and convoluted. Strategies are always complicated and filled with contingencies. They are not necessary, and furthermore do not work in the way you might hope for. Let go of all of them, even if you have believed in the past that in order to love friends and family, and to believe that they love you, required all sorts of strategies, the deeper knowing is that One Life unfolding is all there is. No effort is required, just love and be loved in ease and grace, and be the One Life Awareness you really are. 

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