Emotion in Context #2: Joy & Sorrow
I’ve been a member of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin since 2005. There is a tradition in smaller Unitarian Universalist (UU) congregations called ‘joys and sorrows’ where congregants share the highlights and lowlights of their life with each other — its kind of like the roses and thorns practice that a family might do around the dinner table. Like many things in life, it seemed nice and sweet and supportive and community building. In practice, there are usually some people in any given congregation who participate in ways that make other people want to stop the practice (usually this shows up as repetitive complaining every week about the same thing, or, almost as annoying, repetitive bragging). Now, we could dive into a rabbit hole about this pattern and how it indicates some stuck-ness or some shadow-work that needs to be done — & how a healthy spiritual community might use that information to help their colleagues… Or we could talk about how most congregations just ban (or stop) the practice when they just can’t take it anymore, instead of trying to work with the person (or people) who are stuck. But I don’t want to talk about either of those things… and I’m writing, so I get to pick.
What I do want to talk about is this — I am beginning to suspect that ‘joys and sorrows’ contains a deeper wisdom than I had ever suspected… not necessarily as a practice, but as a signifier. Buddhists say, “The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.” “Joys and Sorrows” may be just such a finger — pointing at something much deeper and much more profound. I am including this in my #BrenéBrown series on emotion, because I think it is another opportunity to talk about how the metatheory of development and enlightenment proposed by Ken Wilber can be used as a structure for untangling some of the conflicting theories on emotions coming out of psychology, social work, sociology, anthropology, etc.
Brené Brown’s work gives us a couple of entrées into this analysis:
- Bittersweet — If you’ve read (or watched) Atlas of the Heart or listened to her podcast — you know how much Dr. Brown loves her some bittersweet. The theory I propose answers the question of why bittersweet is such a compelling emotion — especially for those in ‘the second half of life’ as Fa. Richard Rohr would say.
- Primary and secondary emotions — As I alluded to in yesterday’s article, there is an ongoing concern and debate within the emotions field about primary and secondary emotions. As we talk through joy and sorrow, we will explore the possibility that which emotions appear as primary and secondary is dependent upon our stage of development and our state of consciousness.
- Emotional evolution — Another possibility we’ll entertain is the concept that emotions can have different forms of expression and experience at different stages/states. In other words — joy might be experienced fleetingly at some early or middle stages of development, but as advanced meditation studies suggest and as people like the the Dalai Lama and Eckhart Tolle attest — a waking meditative state which experiences the ‘joy of being’ consistently is quite possible. So, this produces some surmountable definitional-process problems for Dr. Brown’s methodological approach of grounded theory — it would require us to filter lived experience by state/stage in order for the data to properly inform the theory of the emotion as experienced at that state/stage.
Here’s the crux of the theory — and it comes to us from Martin Prechtel with some spiritual (and intellectual and mythical) assistance from Stephen Jenkinson and Martin Shaw:
Love is a coin with two sides: joy and sorry.
Another expression is that the active sides of that same coin are called Praise and Grief. Praise is what we do when we experience joy. (Some of you may get blocked on the word praise, if you substitute gratitude as a near synonym in this context, you are still in the right groove.) Grief is what we do when we experience sorrow. Both praise and grief are skills that must be learned and taught — although both skills can align with natural talents for some. Also, love and life are near synonyms in this context in the Love=Life=God way that I’ve suggested before. Think of it as a three bubble ven diagram that is mostly a three-way overlap.
Here’s the primary implication of this: When we are growing up, waking up, cleaning up, and showing up at higher stages/states of development/consciousness we experience life/love/god directly as the emotions of joy/sorrow. Does that sound like bittersweet to you? It sounds, tastes, smells, and feels like it to me. My hypothesis is that we tend to experience different emotions as primary at different stages and states. At what Wilber calls second tier, I think that we experience (to different degrees and with different levels of consistency) love/life/god directly as joy and/or sorrow. As our capacities to practice praise and grief grow, as our skill at heartbrokenness improves we experience love as the unity of joy and sorrow that it is — bittersweet.
May you find bittersweetness in your spiritual practice this week.
I hope to continue this emotion in context series in the future… I’ve got to dig deeper into Ken Wilber’s Integral Psychology in order to start a preliminary mapping of this theory for the first tier developmental stages and the associated states of consciousness. Thanks for tuning in and if you’d like to support my writing and research, please follow me on Medium. Namaste.
