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Category: Embracing Emotion

When Life Is Fair

“If life is fair, and it will be, it will serve you immeasurable beauties, joys and pleasures—you will feel at times that you do not have the capacity to take them in. You will. Our hearts they are boundless. If life is fair, and it will be, it will bring you huge, merciless sorrows. Devastations of your boundless heart. I wish for you the grace to persevere and accept them across time, for that is the only way these kinds of things can be taken in.”

Dan Weiss

While it is undeniably true that life is unfair in the circumstances into which we are born (i.e. socioeconomic status, parents, access to resources, etc), and in how some people are born into and taken from this world without a fighting chance, it’s also true that for most of us, life is fair in how we’re all going to feel the entire spectrum of human emotions.

…We’re each going to feel joy and pleasure just as we’re each going to feel sorrow and devastation. We’re each going to feel the mesmerizing beauty of love just as we’re each going to feel the heart-wrenching pain of loss. We’re each going to feel grateful and sentimental; nervous and insecure; jealous and enraged; lonely and shameful; amazed and confused; euphoric and peaceful…

…Not at the same times and not in equal proportions, but in full nonetheless. So when you’re thriving, soak it all the way in. And when you’re struggling, remember, you’re never alone. And just because you’re feeling something different than us, doesn’t mean we won’t or don’t feel that, too. Be patient and be kind…

…Because on this front—life is fair.

Fixing Feelings

I started uploading quotes from Crying In H Mart by Michelle Zauner this week to MoveMe Quotes. And one of the quotes I uploaded today was:

“Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding with a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.”

…I’m sure you’ve had moments in your life when people were sharing feelings of grief and you didn’t know how to reply.

What occurred to me as I was reading this today was, if she was explaining this feeling to me directly… this deep, complex, very personal feeling… there’s nothing to explain back.

There’s nothing to fix. There’s nothing to cure. There’s nothing to correct.

There’s no need for any kind of worldly insight or prognosis.

What should be offered in response is simply space.

A space that’s warm. A space that’s supportive. A space that’s patient.

…A space where that person and his/her feelings can fully be.

Because oftentimes, in our relentless pursuit of happiness, we mistakingly believe that grief or pain or sadness is something that should be avoided, cured, or suppressed. And with the world’s insight available to us in just a few thumb taps, it can be tempting to want to curate some type of wise, logical, rational response. When really, it’s this very process of giving ourselves and our feelings space to breathe that we give ourselves what we’re really after in life… depth.

In A Bad Mood

Instead of saying “I’m in a bad mood,” consider saying, “I have some emotions I’m working through.”

We are never just one emotion; never just one mood at any given point in time.

We are all of the moods all of the time.

It just so happens that, like the dancing tide that rises and falls as the moon closes in and retreats from the earth, so too do our various moods rise and fall as various life events (past, present, and future) close in and retreat from our conscious and unconscious mind.

Sometimes it’s obvious why we’re experiencing “bad mood” emotions.

…And sometimes it definitely isn’t.

The key is in not identifying with any one particular emotion so as not to allow it to drown out all of the other emotions.

When we say “I am…” we are referencing all of ourselves. When we say “I have some emotions I’m working through…” we are referencing part of ourselves. And we’re giving space for the other parts (emotions) to rise and fall on their own accord—while simultaneously not flooding the “bad mood” emotions throughout the entirety of our body.

When we give all of our emotions the space they need to rise and fall without clasping or repulsing… we, like the tide to the earth, allow our bodies to breathe: to rise and to fall; to take in and to let out; to welcome and to bid farewell to… the entirety of what makes us human.

P.s. In case you missed it, you can read the best of what I posted to MoveMe Quotes last week, here.

Lightness Through Heaviness

There are zero pictures of me at my worst.

Why? Because I either refused to have them taken or destroyed them.

This is not the way.

It’s important to appreciate each stage of the journey.

Even the stages when you feel awful, ugly, stupid, hopeless, and/or unloveable. Buried deep within all that heaviness is an all-powerful, infinitely-renewable energy source that can propel you forward in ways unimaginable to the person who has only been granted lightness.

Lightness is an ideal—yes.

But, heaviness is an incredible tool.

And those who arrive at lightness through heaviness—feel raw lightness in a way that others only know how to take for granted.

And lightness taken for granted isn’t lightness experienced at all.

P.s. In Meditation #4 of The Art of Forward, I share a very similar concept as the one above titled, “The Ocean of Emotion Within.” Here’s a link to that meditation for free. 🙂

What to do when you don’t feel like yourself?

I think it’s important to first point out that none of us is just one composition of feeling. We are a melting pot of ALL the feelings.

Like a melting pot, when all of the various ingredients (feelings) are getting combined in relatively the same ways… you’ll get relatively the same taste—which becomes what we might consider: feeling like ourself.

When one or more ingredients start to get added disproportionally to the pot, it’ll modify the taste. As is the case when one or more feelings get disproportionately added to our inner state.

The trick then, becomes identifying and reducing the ingredients that are “undesireably” affecting the pot while finding ways to increase the desired ones so as to get the pot back to “normal.”

For example, when cooking, it’s obvious when too much salt has been added to a recipe. A simple solution, is to (1) stop adding more salt and (2) add more of the other ingredients to dilute the power of the salt.

In life, when we feel a rise in an unfamiliar/ uncomfortable feeling, we start by identifying what it is. Once we’ve identified it and can name it, we trace the origin of the feeling to it’s root cause. Then we (1) stop allowing whatever’s causing it to make it worse and (2) add more of the other ingredients that lead to the more desired feelings we’re after.

And soon thereafter (maybe not right away, but soon), you’ll start to slowly feel more like your normal “recipe-d” self.

P.s. I also published: 37 Robert A. Johnson Quotes from Inner Work To Convince You Dreams Aren’t Arbitrary.

E(motional)-Mail

Emotional turbulence doesn’t usually come about all at once. It’s usually the result of an ongoing accumulation of emotional messages that get overlooked and ignored until they pile into an overwhelming mountain of unread messages—which, then, triggers inner turbulence.

…It happens when we say we don’t have time, we’re too busy, or when we keep ourselves blindly distracted. Yet, we have time to incessantly check email and swipe every notification that pops up on our phone?

Maybe, if we took some of that incessant energy that’s pointed towards “productivity” and “networking” and used it to read even just a small portion of the emotional messaging our body sends us… we’d be a helluva lot less turbulent and anxious.

And, heck, we’d probably be a helluva lot more productive and present for proper networking, too.

What’s The Emotion?

Every emotion is trying to signal something to our mind:

  • Anger = What you care about / Where your boundaries are / etc.
  • Jealousy = What you want / The types of feelings you want to have / etc.
  • Sadness = What holds meaning / What really matters / etc.

This is why it’s so crucial to identify the emotion.

You can’t interpret the signal you don’t identify or get confused.