Blogging… & the Emotional Risks of It

Well, besides the main reason I talked about in my previous post (in the original English, https://labofevolution.wordpress.com/2017/08/18/three-silent-months-of-ongoing-integral-yoga/ ), actually there has been also a more negative reason why I stopped blogging for a long while. I want to mention that specific reason too, for it has in fact helped me notice in myself a still too intense vulnerability to the comments some visitors may write, that may not be entirely positive, or may even be entirely negative…!

It happens quite rarely, but over the years, since 2011 when I started this Blog, every time it has happened it has been for me a major emotional shock.

Why should it be so?…

The first and obvious reason is that by temperament I am extremely emotional to start with, that’s for sure. But even that wouldn’t be enough to account for the kind of heart pain I feel when I discover an altogether negative comment on one of my posts: it is as if a long needle was somehow suddenly piercing my heart.

While writing this, the memory comes to me of J.R.R. Tolkien’s comment, in a letter, about how he felt after having finished writing ‘The Lord of the Rings’ – which for him wasn’t simply fiction or ‘fantasy’ at all, but the actual expression of his own most secret inner world since early childhood and youth… which is why he had elected Philology and its study of worldwide ancient epics as his official, respectable way of continuing as an adult in his outer career what had been anyway his intense, irresistible inner passion since as long as he could remember.

He had, unpublished as yet, but written long before, during his direct experience of World War I, his whole cherished ‘Silmarillion’, with ‘Middle-earth’ around it as the vast, rich and inspired background to which all his later writing inevitably belonged, too.  ‘The Hobbit’, the first one to be published, had been a huge success. Already when starting that supposed simple sequel to ‘The Hobbit’ that was rapidly growing instead into ‘The Lord of the Rings’, in his letter he had warned his editor that the whole thing was, somehow by itself, dramatically expanding, and he had tried to explain the inner reasons why; then he had added:

‘Well, I have talked quite long enough about my own follies. The thing is to finish the thing as devised and then let it be judged. But forgive me! It is written in my life-blood, such as that is, thick or thin; and I can no other.’ (Letter 109)

Later on, as he was getting ready to release it as a published book for anyone to read, he again wrote, replying this time to a friend:

‘I am afraid it is only too likely to be true: what you say about the critics and the public. I am dreading the publication, for it will be impossible not to mind what is said. I have exposed my heart to be shot at.’ (Letter 142)

Do I need to say this is the way I feel too?…

What I am writing about, here on this Blog, isn’t just ‘literature’ either, or external, superficial stuff meant only to interest and perhaps impress prospective visitors; even when it is ‘merely’ quotes from some great others, they are those quotes that have been dearest to me as my own lifelines since decades, and still are.

And in many of my posts the more personal contents are even more revealing of my deeper self, with its specific qualities and gifts, yes, but also its many shortcomings – opening the door obviously to sarcasm, then, if some reader is prone to that.

There is no other way, I believe, than to accept such a vulnerability, if I want to achieve the aim I have explained that this Blog took on for me early on, and still has: see my STATEMENT OF PURPOSE (https://labofevolution.wordpress.com/about/statement-of-purpose/).

The original reason why I started this Blog at all?…

It has merely been in answer to the kind suggestion by another Lady-Blogger I was following at that time the posts of. She got interested in one specific aspect of my own ongoing research that I had been explaining to her in a few comments, and she advised me to start a Blog myself on that so fascinating topic.

I wasn’t sure at all that I could, but with her gentle help online to go over the (for me) daunting technical hurdles, to my own utter surprise I soon found myself writing a Blog indeed, on that topic at first… and then, prompted from within, happily and openly about other topics too: the most important ones  actually in my eyes…

And this is when my new friend suddenly turned into the very opposite of the friend she had been for me until then: she had no notion of the actual greatness of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and suspicious of all Spirituality anyway, or so it seemed, she did not at all understand or share any of my respect and gratitude for them, far from it.

In spite of all my best efforts to explain on which deep and convincing reasons my devotion to them was based, in the end it became obvious that there was no way she could change her mind about them, so we parted ways at that point. But it has been a horrendous pain for me to discover this major – and for her unbridgeable – difference between us, through the sudden harshness and downright hostility she expressed towards me as soon as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were mentioned on my Blog.

Nevertheless, I remain ever grateful to her for the so generous help extended at first, and for having been the instrument of the Divine to make me enter the wonderful world of Blogging!

This painful incident early on with that much more experienced Lady Blogger has been a precious warning of what may very well happen again at any time with anyone else among the occasional ‘visitors’ or regular ‘followers’ my Blog started to attract – on its own merits, and not due to any conscious strategy on my part.

Then for a long stretch of time my life as a (part-time) Blogger has been a rather happy one… except that I often wondered with some bewilderment why all those people reading my Blog (I could see the numbers from the Stats, and new ‘followers’ kept adding themselves too) were apparently all disliking the ‘Liking’ procedure that was on the contrary so popular on most other Blogs!… I did suspect the Divine made it happen that way so as not to encourage that tendency in me to look perhaps a little too much to the approval and appreciation of others concerning my work… but still…!!!

And a few months ago, it happened again: two people, one after the other, expressed quite a negative comment on a post of mine.

It did take me by surprise. I was devastated.

It was as if those people I had trusted somehow like friends were suddenly punching me in the face, or in the stomach. It hurt.

So much so that I noticed after a few weeks I couldn’t bring myself anymore to write again. On anything at all.

So I reasoned with myself: was I going really to stop my Blog just because of two persons who had hurt me by their comments?! That would be totally ridiculous!!!

But just try reasoning with your wounded emotional being… Nothing doing: it just cowers down there, in some darker corner of your inner space, licking its wounds silently, and refusing absolutely to come out again, whatever cajoling you might try to make it do so.

So I had simply to wait…

At long last I found it pays being patient with oneself, with any part in oneself that for whatever reason is going through a difficult time:

One fine morning my emotional being was there again, smiling shyly…. ready again to participate in my blogging life!…

“Welcome back, my emotional being!”, I said warmly to it, smiling back; “I’m glad you’re there again: without you my writing doesn’t reach out to other people the way it normally does, and so my recent posts have only been on topics that weren’t really personal – which is all right, but not  – or not only – what this Blog is truly meant to be… Come, let’s work together again from now on!…”

So here we are again, together of course also with my mental being… and let’s not forget all those cells everywhere in my physical being too, who cheerfully make it possible for what I want to write to actually appear here on this Blog for all of you to read… but now I am aware that I have to be especially careful with my emotional being, so as to avoid its being hurt once again… From its part too, by the way, I can feel it is doing its best to learn not to be so extremely sensitive: it can feel that in someone who is practicing the Integral Yoga, such a progress becomes at some point a must… So it is training itself bravely!…

But on the other hand I do hope also that all the people who visit my Blog will realize that I am not trying to impose anything on anybody: I am only sharing whatever I feel might be useful to some others too, from my own experience with Conscious Evolution through the Integral Yoga. Obviously not everything I share will fit the inner needs of everyone else, for that would be totally impossible as each of us is unique.

So those who feel a certain post is not for them could perhaps just leave it alone and come back only for the next one?… which they might like so much that they will, who knows, even ‘Like’ it?!… ;-D

Funny, to unexpectedly find myself laughing about it all at the end of this post…

And will you believe me?! My emotional being is now laughing together with me at the prospect of those imagined ‘Likes’!!!