Contemplative Prayer: Establishing and Practice; Avoiding the Pitfalls – Part 3

 

By Brother David

04: On the place of emotion in prayer

04.1 A brief overview of emotion

Feelings may be intense or negligible; they may be “positive” or “negative;” they may be pleasant or unpleasant; they can be a source of great energy or they can drain us of all energy.  For example, the fear engendered during a car accident or the anger engendered during an argument or the feelings of sadness around the death of a loved one can move us to action or paralyze us or rob us of the power to do anything. The phrase “overcome by grief” describes a real state.  As with any sensation, emotions can be induced and even enjoyed for their own sake. We like rollercoasters and scary movies for the feelings of fear they engender even though (or perhaps because) there is no real threat to our safety. We like tragic stories, songs, and plays for the feelings of sadness they engender, even though (or perhaps because) no real personal loss is involved.

Emotions are a part of the foundation of art and culture: theater pieces and works in the plastic arts are created to influence how we feel and to raise our awareness of what is.  Music, perhaps the most directly emotionally oriented art, can lead us into a deep experience and awareness of the self and of what—or better, Who—is beyond the self.  Rhetoric is calculated to rouse us to passion with the hope of bettering life.  Literature, prose and poetry, through their appeal to our emotions, open us up to a wider and deeper life.  Ceremony and liturgy help us create emotional bonds which propel us to unanimity of mind with one another and with a reality greater than the sum of all of us, whether that be God or the Corps.  The intellectual content of an artistic work informs us as to the artist’s message, but it is the emotional component that moves us to commitment and dedication.

Emotions are also an important part of the foundation of self-knowledge.  We know that our physical self is only a part of who we are.  There are also the facts about us and our history, but these also fall short of saying who we are. It is our awareness of the other and of our emotional connections with the other that form the definitions of our selves.  The facts about us tell us that and what we are in-the-world, but our emotional reality tells us who and how we are in-the-world. That who and how is what truly distinguishes this self from every other self.

As we noted at the beginning of this series, prayer is not about feeling anything in particular and certainly not about generating feelings.  Nevertheless, emotions are integral to being human and, being part and parcel of life, are also part and parcel of prayer—albeit sometimes a problematic part.  To understand the issues around prayer and feelings, we need to consider emotion as such and then to see how our observations apply to prayer.

Let’s take the following as a working definition of emotion: emotions are physically perceivable, transient neural states which are neurochemically induced in response to stimuli occasioned by exterior or interior phenomena.  Let’s examine this a little more closely for a moment.  Emotions like happy, sad, angry, and scared—even feelings associated with reverence or “prayerfulness,” and any other emotions you can feel or think of—are products of our neurochemistry.  We feel them in our bodies and have physical responses to them: we may cry or laugh or frown; our blood pressure may rise so that we feel tense, or drop so that we feel light-headed; our core muscles may tighten or we may feel like jelly inside; we may feel ourselves “up” and “on top of the world” or we may droop and sigh.  Unlike thinking, which we can consider an action of the central nervous system, emotions are rather a state in which thinking and acts of perception take place. As such, they influence how we think and how we behave.  Even though emotions are states, they are also transient, and they pass unless they are reinforced, in which case we are having the same emotion over and over again with very little, if any, space between events.  This is in contrast to “moods,” which are more permanent and less intense and within which emotions can occur.  Finally, emotions occur in response to stimuli, which are caused by things that happen in-the-world or things from our interior like memories or fantasy (see the bibliography note at the end of this chapter).

Given all this, the genesis of an emotion would be something like this: Mary sees John (visual stimulus); they have been friends for many years and most of that has been a happy time (memory stimulus); it’s her birthday, and John has said that he has a surprise for her (fantasy stimulus based on anticipation of something pleasurable): Mary feels happy, affectionate, and excited.

Since our emotions are neurochemical responses to stimuli, we are not directly in control of them, even though, as noted above, we can manipulate circumstances to produce a certain response. This is an important if subtle point: we do not control emotions so much as we control (manipulate, reframe) the conditions that elicit given emotions.  An actor’s ability to cry on cue is due to his or her ability to recall or imagine a scene or event that elicits sadness.  If we were truly able to control emotions directly, we would be able to choose our emotional response, substituting one for another as easily as changing a pair of socks, so that the admonition, “Don’t be afraid” while being chased by a tiger, could be taken, and fear would disappear.  But an emotion, while based in part in the interactions of the limbic and sympathetic systems of the brain, is also formed by our awareness of what is going on as well as our memory of what has been and our imaginings of what might be. In an important sense, how I feel about anything is largely dependent on who I am, who I have been, who I want to be, who I imagine myself to be, how I perceive the world, and how I imagine or can imagine the world to be.  Changing how I feel about something means changing my perception of it.

Among the things that influence how we are in-the-world (and thereby our emotional life) is any form of conditioning we receive—whether intended or not.  Conditioning helps to form our perceptions, which in turn affect our emotions, which in turn affect our actions.  Desensitization to the pain of others, for example, is what makes it possible for a trauma surgeon to overcome feelings of sadness or horror or fear so that his/her patient can be treated effectively. Desensitization to the pain of others is also what made it possible for Nazi guards to kill Jewish men, women, and children in the gas chambers of Buchenwald and Auschwitz.  Sensitization to the pain of others makes it possible for therapists to have a depth of empathy that allows for effective treatment of their clients. Less benignly, sensitization to and by a traumatic event is what makes possible the paralysis brought on by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Other forms of conditioning enable the marksman—or the assassin—to induce a sense of calm by, for example, controlling the breath or by envisioning a peaceful scene, in order to hit the target. 

It is important to remember and understand that we are always being conditioned by both external forces, such as society and family, and internal forces, such as our values.  Many benefits come about through conditioning, but the problem is that much of our conditioning is done without our conscious assent or even awareness.   While it is to be hoped that we will receive messages of love, care, and concern, early conditioning in the family and from society might also include such messages as “Boys don’t cry.”  “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about.”  “How could you do such a horrible thing to me?”   If they are fortunate, children in a family will receive beneficial conditioning that will help them grow into well-adjusted adults with healthy self-images and minimal emotional issues.  Most of us aren’t quite so fortunate: our conditioning within the family and society may have contained inconsistencies and contradictions which we weren’t equipped to handle at a young age; hence, our emotional coping mechanisms may be, to a greater or lesser extent, dysfunctional.  The more we become aware of this, the more it becomes incumbent upon us to re-condition ourselves through healthy relationships, values, and practices; prayer, as we shall see later, can play an integral role in the healthy restructuring of the self.

A further issue in dealing with emotions is discerning what we are actually feeling.  A friend of mine says, “I used to have two emotions: mad and not mad; then I found out that a lot of what I thought was anger was really fear.”  I also know people who have difficulty distinguishing among sadness, sorrow, embarrassment, and shame.  And most, if not all of us, have had moments when we’ve said, “I don’t know what I’m feeling right now.”   Some of this confusion is the result of early, inconsistent conditioning. Some can be the result of mental conditions such as personality disorders, addiction, and mental or mood disorders (e.g. depression or bi-polar disorder)—all of them either sub-clinical or full-blown (which ends up including a rather large swath of the human population). Some is just the result of day-to-day stress (which includes all of the human population).  

A further complication to the discernment of feelings occurs because, while emotions are things we feel, not everything that we feel is an emotion.  For example, Jack might feel “apprehensive” and “surly” after staying up late to watch the end of a ball game.  He casts around for reasons why he might feel this way and then finds one: “Susan took my paperclips yesterday, and now I’m angry.”  The problem is that the “object” or condition cited might not be the immediate or even the remote cause of the feelings: sensations that can be characterized by the terms “apprehensiveness” and “surliness” can be caused by being over-tired.  What Jack may actually have “accomplished” by finding his “reason” to feel surly and apprehensive was to move himself from having an innocuous physical sensation to creating a charged emotional one.  This kind of event has the added effect of strengthening the conditioning of the person: Jack will now find it easier to distrust and dislike Susan and it will be harder to come up with positive associations around her to have emotional responses more likely to promote trust.  Life may well now become unnecessarily harder. Thus, not only has the emotional issue been clouded, but the sufferer, Jack, may have also reinforced certain feelings to his detriment.  (Way to go, Jack.)  Ultimately and unfortunately, whatever the source and whatever the cause, we all have moments when it is hard to distinguish what is going on in our emotional life.

04.2 Making use of emotion in prayer

As we noted in our considerations of what prayer is not and what it is, prayer is not about having an emotional experience. The point of prayer is to deepen our relationship with God.  And, while we don’t want to try to generate feelings, feelings will occur.  We want to feel good, though, and it is tempting to seek out good emotional experiences. As we noted earlier:

One of the traps of prayer is the belief that we should feel certain things about God and prayer: we should feel reverent, we should feel sorrow, or we should feel joy, and when we don’t feel what we think of as appropriate feelings, we can believe that our prayer is deficient.  Just as dangerous and misleading is thinking that an intense emotional experience in my prayer time means that my prayer was “good.”  

In much of classical writing on spirituality and prayer, the emotions are referred to as the passions, things which we suffer, and one of the aims of prayer is understood to be to bring us to a passionless state (apatheia).  I believe that this is a misunderstanding: we cannot be conscious and not feel something.  What we can do, however, is to understand what we are feeling, what the true objects of our feelings are, and what response we make to that awareness: not that we do not feel but that we are not at the mercy of our feelings.

We have already seen that our emotions can give us an awareness of our interior state—the temperature of our interior state, if you will.  It is not that we are seeking to raise or lower the temperature but rather that we simply want to know what the temperature is.  When we sit with feelings in prayer, we seek to perceive what they are and what they are pointing to.  The more charged the emotion is, the more is our need to sit with it quietly and let it sort itself out.  We do not posit or seek out an object for our feelings, rather, we let the possible objects present themselves.  We recognize that emotions are fleeting and can be deceptive.  We try to sort out the strands of our history and conditioning from what we perceive to be going on within ourselves.  We recognize that there are no bad or good emotions.  The emotions are simply our reaction to all of whatever is going on at this time.

As we sit with these feelings and regard them, we also recognize our limitations.  If we suffer from depression or anxiety or other mood or psychological disorders, we acknowledge the power that these conditions have in our lives and that these conditions will influence how we feel.  Again, we do not judge them or ourselves: we simply acknowledge and observe.   

We acknowledge the energy present in the emotion.  Anger and sadness are powerful emotions; so are joy and feelings of reverence.  We observe all of our feelings and the promptings of the energy.  Do we feel driven to vengeance?  Affection? Weeping?  We observe.  We feel what we feel.  We discern. 

As we sit quietly with the feelings and come to understand their basis, we are able to start reframing the stimuli.  If we feel rage, we recognize the immediate offense, but we also recognize how our history and conditioning contribute to the emotion.  We acknowledge the past, and, in our recognition of what is past, we are able to reframe the issue such that the past, while still operant, has less power in the present circumstance.  We can then look at the present circumstance more dispassionately.  We have moved from rage to anger.  And when we can see the situation clearly, we can choose an appropriate response—an effective response.

In the prayer of repentance, this means that we do not get lost in feelings of shame or guilt.  We acknowledge what we have done, and we look at what we need to do.  Guilt has given us the impetus toward repentance, but for repentance to be real we must move beyond the feeling of guilt and into appropriate action.  In the prayer of petition, we do not get lost in feelings of pity or sorrow, but we move beyond them to effective action.

An image from the classical literature on prayer is that of the ship: the emotions, the passions are the wind which can drive the ship, the sails and rudder are the reason which allow us to use the wind in a way that is beneficial to us.  There are times when the wind is more than we think we can handle. At those times, we take the sails down and wait out the storm.  Unless we reinforce the storm, it will end.  It has to: feelings cannot sustain themselves without constant stimulus.

Again, I recognize that people can be clinically depressed or anxious or have any of a host of other mood, psychiatric, or psychological disorders.  In those cases, we need to be brave enough and self-compassionate enough to seek help.  We may not be able to “reframe” ourselves out of depression, but we can recognize when our depression is worse than usual and realize that we don’t have to act on what the depression tells us.

As we come to understand our feelings better and to practice discernment, we find ourselves better able to bring our values and ideals into our process.  To take the example of rage again, we saw that we could reduce the intensity of the feeling by sorting out past from present.  As we sit with the anger that remains, we look at the situation and work to see how mercy and justice apply. We are aware of Christ overturning the tables of the money changers in the temple, but we are also aware of His forgiveness from the cross of those who crucified Him.  We pray for compassion.  We ask for wisdom and right attitude and action.  Our aim is not to do away with anger.  Our aim is to be with the anger in such a way that it can subside and leave us in a better place than we were in before.

This same process is also beneficial when it comes to emotions like joy and feelings of reverence.  Like anger and sadness, these also have their objects and life-cycle: they, too, shall pass.  We hold these feelings lightly so that we can let them subside.  We do not seek to make them permanent because they cannot be permanent.  In this process, we are also grateful for all of our emotions.  We recognize that they all serve a God-given purpose and that our life and our prayer would be poorer if not impossible without them. 

This is true apatheia: that we are no longer subject to imperious feelings.  Rather, the emotions have taken their proper place in the self.  They have ceased to be passions from which we suffer but have instead taken their rightful place as servants whose purpose is to help us in our journey into God.

 

Bibliographical Note

An interesting note on interior stimuli when we’re talking about how emotions are formed: the central nervous system makes little distinction between “imagined” and “real” events, which is why we can feel angry, happy, afraid, etc. in anticipation of an event: we are responding emotionally to a stimulus based in our imagination.  For a good treatment of this, see “Miswanting: Some Problems in the Forecasting of Affective States,” by Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson, in­ Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition, Joseph P. Forgas, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp 178–197.

For a more clinical but still very readable account of the formation of emotions and how they work, see Rick Hanson, PhD with Richard Mendius, MD, Buddha’s Brain: the practical neuroscience of happiness, love & wisdom. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 2009.  Of particular note are the sections dealing with the impact of the brain’s negative bias on emotions like anger and fear.