Tipping Sacred Cows by Betsy Chasse

Author:Betsy Chasse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books / Beyond Words

“Feel,” Another Four-Letter Word

Sometimes you just want to throttle someone, and clearly we can’t do that. Or can we? I ask coyly and rhetorically. Maybe if not literally, then at least in our heads for just a minute. Please? How often have we said no, we must rise above, be greater, more spiritual, and shove that baby deep down like a hot dog in a hot dog eating contest? I caught myself the other day, judging and reacting in horror as my sweet, loving eight-year-old explained how she really was mad at someone and wished they were never born. Of course this went against every image I had of my sweet, aware, conscious little wonder and I went into a long lecture about how she needed to be understanding, how wishing that upon someone would only bring her unhappiness, the whole trip, when really all she wanted was to be mad and hurt and feel it, express it, and get it out. And there I was telling her to shove it way down.

There goes another hot dog, piling up with all the rest until the inevitable upchuck involving barely chewed meat, bun, and condiments, landing all over us and anyone standing nearby. Spewing, I believe it is called, which is appropriately a word that can metaphorically also stretch from hot-dog–eating contests to how we vent something like anger.

I have come to a place where I am over this notion that spiritual means we mustn’t feel “bad” feelings, we mustn’t attach, we mustn’t react. Which you know is not a good way to go, because the word mustn’t is involved. I’m also not keen on this whole idea that we should love everybody, even if they are assholes. Maybe it’s true that their asshole-ish tendencies and the shit that arises from those tendencies are all our fault because we created the situation so we could teach ourselves some lesson about our big, bad ego. And maybe we should just kill off our egos so we can live like eunuchs in caves, eventually floating so high that our astral bodies soar into the sky, bursting open like amethyst-colored firecrackers, sprinkling our love and light back onto the people (including the assholes) who haven’t figured it all out and therefore deserve to suffer. But, seriously, if I hear one more of my compadres in the spiritual know-it-all circle say, “I wish they’d all wake up,” I’m going to rip off their sleep masks and blind them with the light within me. Because we all could use a refresher course in emotional intelligence, and even the most bright-eyed and bushy-tailed beings among us are still asleep most of the time. Bad feelings and attachment and reactions are not automatically bad things.

The reality is, we’re here in this reality, and we can either pretend it doesn’t exist or master it. I’m going for mastery, but not in the way modern-day spirituality has offered up. It’s time for a revolution in terms of what it means to live a spiritual life.

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