Episode 384 - Dealing with Emotional Storms

Living Myth

Michael Meade

Transformation, Philosophy, Society & Culture, Genius, Education, Myth, Soul, Culture

4.9 • 944 Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode brings a focus to ways in which the troubles and tragedies of the world can fall upon us in storms of emotion. When life becomes greatly uncertain, and the daily world becomes deeply unsettled, we can find ourselves subjected to sudden states of fear and anxiety. Michael Meade uses an old Sufi teaching story to open up the emotional territory where fear can become contagious and one emotion can turn into another.

Emotions are a necessary and mysterious presence, a flow of energies without which we cannot tell if we are alive or not. Emotions make us vulnerable and volatile, but they also allow us to change and grow. The old idea is not that we should avoid, reject or repress emotions, but rather that we need to learn how to feel them. Raw emotions can be eruptive and disruptive, yet feelings can contain emotional energies so that they become centering, instructive and healing.

Fear can awaken instincts and intuitions that we need for survival. Anger can reset personal boundaries when we feel overwhelmed or violated. Sorrow can wash away attitudes that no longer serve us. Emotions turn out to be part of the great outflowing of life, without which we cannot fully live or change or meaningfully grow. When not repressed or denied, emotions serve as the vital links between body, spirit and soul. In that sense, emotions can be seen as messages that keep us connected to a deeper sense of self and to a greater sense of life, especially when the world around us is radically changing.

Thank you for listening to and supporting Living Myth. You can hear Michael Meade talk more about the territory of emotions by joining his free online event “How To Not Abandon Oneself” on Thursday, June 13.

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Transcript

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0:17.0	Welcome to the Living Myth Podcast with Michael Mead, where this shifting, changing world is looked at from a mythic perspective.
0:19.7	This episode brings a focus to ways in which the troubles and tragedies of the world The uncertain and the daily world becomes deeply unsettled, we can find ourselves subjected
0:36.4	to sudden states of fear and anxiety.
0:40.8	Michael Mead uses an old Sufi teaching story to open up the emotional territory where fear can
0:47.4	become contagious and one emotion can turn into another. The mass of pressures generated by the uncertainty that now plagues the entire world
1:18.0	places all of us under greater stress and it pushes more people to the edge of life and increasingly pushes people
1:27.6	over the edge.
1:30.0	And over the edge can mean falling into a big or deep emotion at any moment in the course of a day
1:38.8	because of all the troubles and tragedies that are both happening and being constantly reported to us.
1:49.0	Of course there has always been fear and there's always been anxiety and uncertainty in the world.
1:57.3	It's just that it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid them when the world itself becomes rattled by and permeated with things that
2:08.5	are deeply troubling, tragically distorted, and fearful.
2:15.0	So after waking up with some vague sense of fear being nearby,
2:21.0	I caught something flickering at the edge of my own awareness, and realized it was this
2:28.0	old Sufi story about how a person can fall into fear and how fear can spread from one person to another.
2:38.0	The story involves Mueller Nasradin, who is the wise fool in many Sufi teaching stories.
2:46.9	On one hand he acts out the foolishness and the fearfulness and the regressions that all humans experience.
2:56.4	And on the other hand, he winds up pointing out some piece of wisdom that can be found even in the midst of confusion.
3:06.8	The story begins when Nasrahdin was walking along
3:10.6	a lonely road one night partially lit by the light of the moon when he heard a
3:17.8	snore coming from somewhere it seemed almost as if it was coming from underneath his feet.
3:23.6	And suddenly he became wildly afraid and was about to run
	...

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