Trusting
Emotions
“What
I discover, again and again, is that feeling any one feeling deeply
enough—that is, thoroughly and completely—somehow opens me to the
common source of all feeling. And at that source, no one feeling can
last by itself.”
Mark
Nepo (The Book of Awakening)
Some
of us put off strong emotions; we shut them down or cut them off as
irrational, stupid. When we feel sadness creeping up, we convert it
to anger, or channel it into work, but we don't go deeply into
sadness for fear it will render us non-functional. We do the same
thing with joy, believe it or not. We don't allow ourselves to feel
giddy because we might act and sound silly. And sometimes when we're
terribly happy, our laughter turns into tears, and that certainly
seems out of control.
Our
emotions come from an old part of the brain, one not always
understood by the newer, more rational layers. When we don't trust
ourselves to come through strong emotions without 'losing it' or
doing something we will regret, we quickly shut them down. But
shutting off our feelings puts us into a flat plane of existence, one
that is mono-chromatic and arid. We can walk through days, even
years, essentially cut off from the very juice that makes us human
and gives life its color, its vitality.
Yet
we know tears can turn into laughter; at the very root of
anxiety lies a calm center, and more often than not, after a good
cry we are far more clear-headed. If we allow ourselves to feel what
we feel, those very feelings can lead us to answers; even to
solutions our very smart new brains could not think up in a million
years. Underneath all emotion lies a common source, and that source
informs us of our true reality. It is often a deeper wisdom than that
which comes from our thinking brains. We can trust it.
In
the spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment