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Originally Posted by Democritus  I'm just curious to know what any of you think the phrase 'accepting your feelings' actually means. [...] Is there a practical and helpful side to this? |
Yes, definitely.
A good deal of emotional reactions is learned. Suppose you feel anxious about something. What will likely happen is that you'll notice this and get stuck in a thought pattern such as "oh no, I'm anxious. I don't want to be anxious. It's illogical to be anxious because of this. I really shouldn't be anxious." And so on. In other words, you
concentrate on the anxiety. Your thoughts cling to it. That's a problem, because your thoughts are directly fed back to another part of the brain that says, "a-ha, so we're thinking about anxiety. Anxiety must be important in this situation. Let's keep it going for some more time." Consequently, your anxiety makes itself at home and watches you watching it.
So, what are you to do? The common solution is to lift an idea from meditation. The whole secret is the following attitude shift: become aware that your emotions usually arise totally out of your control, and that they will eventually pass. It follows that a) it doesn't make sense to beat yourself up over them and b) they will go away on their own accord. Once you realize this, it supposedly becomes easy to observe your emotions and decide what to do about them (e.g. nothing). It's a lot more boring for an emotion to stay around if you are not bothered by it, and it'll eventually become cooperative instead: "oh, hi, Democritus, this is anxiety reporting in. I had this feeling I should show up. How are you doing? How's the weather? Well, I'll be on my way then, take care".
I said supposedly because all this is easy to write down but hard to put into practice. There are lots of guides to meditation but even of those people who decide to give it a shot, not everyone succeeds. I, for example, am still far away from being so aware of myself. Learning meditation involves building (cognitive) habits and I have a definite weakness there. I'll probably need to do some more experimentation.
If you like, I can give you a few pointers to articles that I found insightful.