Spiritual Life and Our Emotions: Toward Wholeness and Integration

Transformation of our emotion life remains one of the greatest challenges confronting us on our spiritual path.

Emotions and the Spiritual Struggle

Indeed, perhaps in exasperation, many historical strands of Christianity relegated feelings to an inferior and suspect status, often seeing them as manifestations of female weakness far less trustworthy and more 'primitive' than 'male' rational powers. Strong feelings needed to be muted for fear of muddying objectivity, with 'dispassion' being seen as somehow superior. Some emotions, such as anger, even found their way onto lists of deadly sins.

In reality, our so-called ‘objective’ thoughts are never separate from our feeling life; we deceive ourselves when we fail to recognise their deep interdependence. This myth of rational objectivity is more exposed in our current post-modern culture where we also recognise that we can be strongly emotional and lucid at the same time. Furthermore, we also now know that the practice of dissociating ourselves from our emotions, especially our darker or more uncomfortable ones, can seriously disrupt our ability to think clearly and act morally.

Feelings as Ways of Knowing

In contemporary times, emotional experience is embraced as part of our holistic spirituality, and understood to have an essential role in our full humanity and holiness. Martha Nussbaum, a distinguished American philosopher, argues that emotions help us see what is important in life - what moves us, and so help us recognise important truths. They are ways of embodied knowing with an important evaluative essence.

Any aspect of experience can mediate the Divine, and feelings also often provide a powerful window to the Holy. We can meet the Creator Spirit in the glory of a morning sunrise, in the intricacy of a leaf, or in the sense of awe at the power present in a moorland landscape. The Spirit also lives in the world community's sense of compassion for those trapped in situations of disaster, poverty or oppression. Feelings such as grief tell us what we value and the importance of what we care about.

Feelings have an object, an 'aboutness', it is this intentionality that reveals their evaluative purpose. Jung argued that it was because Nazi Germany separated off their feeling function that the atrocities happened. Anyone truly in touch with the full range of their emotions could not have knowingly participated in running the death camps. Through human history very 'rational' arguments have been made to justify atrocities ranging from the slave trade, to female suppression, to genocide, to genetic manipulation of food sources. Modern neurological research also demonstrates that impairments in emotional capacity, such as those caused by brain damage in areas essential for emotional processing, can actually retard our ability to make sound decisions. Ignatius Loyola, in the 16th Century, also understood the importance of our emotions in the spiritual life, as a key part of our felt inner process of discernment.

Vulnerability, Control, and the Fear of Feeling

Emotions also reveal those places in life where we feel vulnerable, where we acknowledge our own neediness and incompleteness before parts of the world we don't fully control. Perhaps this has been part of the struggle that has relegated the value of our feeling life, for it is difficult to be 'naked' and vulnerable with ourselves and others, recognising and being in places beyond our control where strong emotions pervade us; particularly in a culture that can outwardly value emotional suppression as in some way being spiritually superior. But if we were without our capacity to engage the spectrum of all our feeling life, not only would our moral function be impaired, but would life not be bereft of all its subtle tones and shades? And it is often these very places of emotional crisis, where we long for meaning and purpose so desperately, that reveal to us our need of the Divine if we are willing to listen.

However, it is a tricky business. Feelings, from anger to compassion, are complex and capable of much distortion as well as wisdom. When the mind is dominated by destructive emotions it can be essentially out of control, we can feel ourselves powerless, enslaved; drowning in their torrent like the leaf in this picture.

Integration, Wholeness, and Transformation

We can also chase our thoughts and emotions in our mind, being swept along by, and helplessly identified with, them rather than being able to witness their wisdom. Have you ever experienced not being able to get the same circling patterns of thoughts, over something that has heightened your emotions, perhaps annoyed you, out of your mind...? Yet, unwillingness to confront these destructive emotions, or of condemning them as spiritually impure, leads us to repress them, to refuse and cut-off part of ourselves. But splitting off part of ourselves is contrary to any Christian understanding of peace or wholeness, where shalom is not a static state but a dynamic, lived integration of our inner contradictions, and is not seen as a static condition but as the dynamic interplay of opposites balancing one another. Wholeness is understood to be essentially paradoxical.

When we refuse part of ourselves, and the paradox of our humanity, we create in our psyche what Carl Jung describes as our Shadow — a dimension of the psyche that spirituality often struggles to acknowledge. In spiritual communities we do indeed often also have feelings about our feelings. We may fear or judge them as unacceptable and struggle to know how to integrate them into a healthy spirituality, and so bury them away in our depths.

​So it is not emotions themselves that are the problem, but how we relate and respond to them without becoming identified with and lost in them. The challenge is not one of taming or controlling emotions in a sterile version of humanity, but one of a knowing relationship and transformation.

Neither the repression of our emotional life, nor acting it out, resolves or transforms it; or in Christian terms we may say liberates or 'saves' it. Being out of relationship to the more uncomfortable parts of our emotional life, in favour of a false spirituality that projects that all is well, can lead to what John Welwood named 'spiritual bypassing', a subtle but pervasive way of avoiding the work of inner integration.

The challenge we face is to be able to stay present to stronger emotions while retaining a clear awareness that does not collapse into identifying with them. This is not about controlling or suppressing our emotional life, but about coming into a more conscious and compassionate relationship with it. Neither repression nor acting emotions out brings transformation or freedom. Rather, emotional wholeness is gradually cultivated as we learn to remain open and undefended in the midst of inner turbulence, allowing ourselves to be met by God there.

Many people find that having a regular space of attentive, non-judgmental listening can gently support this learning, helping us stay with what arises without being overwhelmed by it. In the Christian tradition, it is this repeated turning toward the divine presence, even in our vulnerability, that slowly deepens our sense of being loved, accepted, and held, and allows our emotional life to be transformed from the inside out.