Wandering upon the affective terrain

[rva_jeremy]

One thing I am trying to do, and seek to get better at, is to feel my 'inner body' whenever unpleasant emotion shows itself.  Not much reflection as to it's source, just the attempt to feel it fully.

This is exactly what I'm doing, if I understand you correctly.  It's a big commitment, and it militates against years of numbness and perceived safety.  I don't think you can balance until you have a grip on what it is you're balancing.  Even if you could balance by instinct, it still wouldn't deliver the same experience to the Creator via the roots of mind.  There's something about your conscious attention that certifies it and rounds it out.

I can't help but wonder though if I am just fooling myself into thinking I am processing the emotion when in actual fact it is just more suppression.  How can you truly know when you have dealt with an emotion or just suppressed it?

Yup, this is something I struggle with.   One of the downsides of the Law of One material is that sometimes the overly technical nature of how those of Ra articulate matters makes things seem cleaner and more discrete than they actually are.  We should not expect a time/space-y experience of emotions, where they are likely much more concrete objects to apprehend.  This is gonna be sticky and uncertain, and I'd be worried if it wasn't like that.  In fact, I had an opposite sort of experience as you: when I had the tiny breakthrough with my emotions that I described in the article, I was worried I was misperceiving it precisely because it was so tangible!  One gets so used to vagueness that one doubts when insights actually materialize. 

Just like meditation, the best thing you can do for yourself is stop worrying about whether you're doing it correctly.  So where I've landed now (I may yet again change my mind) is that it's not important to figure out whether you're suppressing or otherwise attempting to resolve the emotion.  What's important is to pay attention to the experience.  If you're suppressing, pay attention to that.  If you're lashing out, really pay attention to the way that makes you feel.  If you're doing neither, well, what does that feel like?  What does the feeling of resistance to doing any of this feel like?  

We need an emotional vocabulary so our minds can be allies in this process rather than constantly doubting it, and the only way you can build that vocabulary is with primary first-hand experience.  I'm not saying we need to reason about emotional matters; I'm saying that, at least for me, in the same way that recognizing language is ultimately something deep down in your mind that you just get used to identifying, recognizing emotion is something deep down in your heart that you just get used to identifying.  That means I have had to be really honest with myself about feelings, and allow myself to go down to the roots, and have compassion and patience for myself when I cannot do this.  Daily meditation is very helpful here.

I'm reading the Channeling Handbook right now, and the more I do, the more what I'm describing above seems like a twist on tuning.  You cannot tune an instrument without hearing its initial pitch.  We have to get a baseline of emotional registering before we can work on it--that's what I mean by a "vocabulary".  So if you feel like I do--a n00b with emotions--the first step in working with it, as far as I know, is to simply acknowledge them.  That in and of itself is incredibly difficult for guys like me.