A friend of mine recently sent me an article that deeply resonated with me. In it, the author, Fiona Robertson, shares her personal experience of working through overwhelming emotions and intense suffering using the Living Inquiries<\/em> method:<\/p>\n “The biggest revelation for me came when I was able to feel emotions and sensations without the words and images attached to them. I\u2019d always taken it for granted that those feelings were the suffering. Stripped of their associations, the layers of meaning, it turned out that even intense emotions were bearable. More than that, they sometimes became pleasurable, or at least neutral. Energy moving through the body, and being felt. Indistinguishable from aliveness, and no longer perceived as negative in any way. I discovered the breathtaking, exquisite beauty in sadness, the innocence of fear, the high of anger, stripped of its connotations.<\/em><\/p>\n Going through the inquiry process, over and over again, the underlying belief that there was something wrong with what I was feeling, that sense of I shouldn\u2019t be feeling like this, began to ebb away. Suffering, as Hafiz pointed out, comes not from life itself, but from our quibbling about it. The more we scream This shouldn\u2019t be happening, the more we suffer. By taking a look at each element of our experience, gently, curiously, and with courage, meeting all of it as it is, we untangle the tale of suffering, and the one who suffers is nowhere to be found.<\/em><\/p>\n I used to believe that my suffering would end when my feelings and thoughts were somehow magically transmuted into their opposites. It is delightful to discover that the end of suffering lies in those very same feelings and thoughts, exactly as they are. My life continues as it did, my feelings and thoughts come and go as they do, and yet what was once considered suffering is now vital, alive, precious, and very much less serious than it used to seem.” <\/em><\/p>\n Fiona Robertson, “On seeing through suffering”<\/p>\n What made me want to share Fiona Robertson\u2019s words is a powerful phrase from her piece: \u201cStripped of their associations, the layers of meaning, it turned out that even intense emotions were bearable.\u201d<\/em> This perfectly mirrors my own experience working with people in deep emotional pain \u2013 what Eckhart Tolle refers to as the \u201cdense pain body.<\/a>\u201d I’ve had clients whose emotions were so overwhelming that I genuinely worried they might pass out. But as soon as I gently asked them to locate where in their body the emotion was felt, its intensity would immediately drop. Simply directing attention to the physical dimension of the emotion had a near-magical effect \u2013 it brought calm and groundedness. The suffering, which had seemed unbearable just moments earlier, would reduce to mere physical discomfort. What made it unbearable wasn\u2019t the sensation itself, but the mental layers wrapped around it\u2014interpretations, beliefs, memories, or future projections that distorted or rejected reality.<\/p>\n