Write for your Right

Naming and defining generally help to establish distance. The Vedanta tradition has a story to illustrate this point. A lavish feast is held for the wedding of the prince-- by invitation only. A man sneaks in uninvited, saying he is a cousin of the bride. The attendants let him in, but they are suspicious. The man eats and drinks liberally, flirts with the women, talks and sings loudly, mingles, and has a good time, sometimes dropping good taste and decency. After a while, seeing his unseemly behaviour, the attendants confront him: Who are you, what is your name and surname, where do you live, what is your exact relation to the bride, etc. The man suddenly gives some excuse, and vanishes.

The story means to show how, by observing and precisely naming the contents of the psyche that have acquired too much power, we can keep them under control. How are we to treat intruders? Do we allow them to spread themselves around? If we attentively observe and define the emotions and ideas that absorb our world, we find that they vanish, or at least weaken. To give a precise name to our emotions helps us distance ourselves from them and diminishes there power over us. This is also what happens with the techniques of emotional eriting: If we write down our most emotionally charged experiences, we generate a distance, and free ourselves from them. Our past traumas no longer weigh us down; we can live in the present.