Titksha: Welcoming All Feelings

Dear Rosies,

This week I've been teaching a practice called titiksha, an old Sanskrit word. It means the capacity to hold more of your own feeling without reacting out of it. It's the sharpened steadiness that can hold whatever comes, and in the Tantric view, that holding becomes a welcome. It's not quite forbearance, which sounds stoic and a little grim, but rather the melting into any sensation, an allowing which is warmer and far more alive.

When a feeling lands, the body respondes first.The body goes on alert before the mind has caught up. Maybe the hands tingle or the throat tightens, the belly tightens, The mask of the face changes. If it's an overwhelming sensation, the old reflex is to run from it.  Discharge it as fast as possible: argue, defend, withdraw, send the text. Eat something, smoke something, drink something, f*ck something, buy something. Anything not to feel. 

In titiksha, we meet it.

The practice is to slow down right there. Feel the tingling as it rises, take one full breath, and stay quiet long enough to watch it move.

If it's happening with another person, when we do speak, we might narrate the sensation instead of the argument. "I notice my hands are tingling. My throat is getting tight. I feel very young right now." It sounds almost too simple, but it's disarming in the best sense, because it brings both people back to the living being who is actually having the response. And when someone needs an answer immediately, you can say so plainly: "I'm feeling my feelings and working out what I want to say. Please give me a moment."

This matters far beyond our own nervous systems. What we can't hold, we tend to hand to someone else. Unfelt shame turns into blame. Refused grief congeals in the body, energy stops moving, and we lose the ability to receive. Across families and whole countries, this is much of the reactivity we are living inside right now, charge passed down the line like a current. Each person who can stay with their own sensation long enough to let it move becomes a place where pain gets metabolized and the chain ends there. That is a gift to the whole human family.

And yes, the overwhelm can happen with pleasure too, or excitement, or turn-on, or even love, when it's so much good you can barely take it. Dumbstruck by the beauty, we try to come back to center. 

You can do this holding in company. "I'm grieving so much right now, would you stay with me?" is part of the practice too. And from a steadier place, you begin to see the people around you more clearly, including when their behavior is coming from their own pain.

Seeing that is titiksha turned outward.

One more thing I have learned over the years. A person who expects to be attacked or expects pain tends to get attacked, and then makes their life smaller and smaller trying to avoid it. You cannot shrink your life enough to escape that frequency. You step off it by shifting your frequency, with starts with feeling more, not running, and looking inside the self.

Take that full breath, let the wave rise and move through you. See how much of your own experience you can hold, and notice how much more of life you can receive.

To your most beautiful, valued, sacred embodiment,

Christine Marie Mason

Founder, Rosebud Woman

------

Titikṣā (तितिक्षा) comes from the root tij, "to be sharp." Titikṣ- is its desiderative form. The idea runs something like "to make oneself keen or firm," and in use it came to mean to bear, endure, forbear. It is a cousin of tejas (fiery brilliance) and tīkṣṇa (sharp). Source text examples.

• Gītā 2.14: tāṁs titikṣasva bhārata. Sense contacts bring cold and heat, pleasure and pain; they come and go, so bear them.
• Vivekacūḍāmaṇi 24 gives the definition: sahanaṁ sarva-duḥkhānām apratīkāra-pūrvakam, cintā-vilāpa-rahitam, meaning bearing all sorrows without trying to counter or fix them, free of worry and lament.