Feelings Aren't Facts

TSM is probably shaking his head at me now for quoting Alan Watts because I was so opposed to his teachings, but my algorithms keeps showing me gems like this one.

"They" say feelings aren't facts. I'm 100% on board with that for our feelings change from one moment to the next. However, I think many people, especially in our society, understand that to mean that we are not meant to feel our feelings, that we need to brush them aside.

We tend to pride ourselves on being "stoic" without really understanding what that even means. I'm not a philosopher, nor have I studied much philosophy outside the requirements for college and divinity school, but I would say most people understand stoicism to be synonomous with emotionless. That's simply not the case and it has taken me a while to understand that. A year ago I would have told you I was stoic; I wanted to be detached from everything. I determined that everything I do must be based in reason. I didn't have time for feelings so I did the most obvious thing for too many years; I suppressed them.

Here's the problem, though... we're human, we have emotions. We feel.

Watts isn't saying that you stay in the pain and then relegate yourself to a life of misery. Instead, he is saying the opposite, and I believe it aligns with Stoicism. He's saying, from my perspective only, that you will experience pain, you will experience fear, you will experience sadness. And just like we bask in happiness, confidence, gratitude and all the "good" emotions, we need to feel the "bad" emotions too. We must hold them in contemplation, recognize where they come from, and then release them.

Instead of unleashing them, we usually run from them. But guess what? We usually run in circles, confronting them again and again to the the point that the sadness, the fear, the anger, the pain, the resentements, the jealousies... all of it, have grown exponentially to the point our physical bodies can no longer hold them in anymore. And if we try, we usually destroy ourselves in the process.

Stoicism would likely teach us to recognize the emotions when they happen, understand them, and let them go. Don't keep running in circles. Watts would probably say if you do that, then you become your emotions. 

We have emotions. We are not emotions. 

This quote by Watts is from his book The Wisdom of Insecurity . Most of those instagram snippets come from larger swaths of talks or books, of course. If you don't want to read the full book, you can find a larger portion here.