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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about positive, about being positive, about negative and positive emotions, about the plethora of courses, books, talks, workshops, websites that all focus on positive thoughts, actions, meditations and practices.
They take something away from us, they take a lot away.
They create a disconnect from a huge part of us, from who we are, from what we feel, from being human. There’s almost an implicit judgement against feeling a whole range of emotions that are absolutely human, absolutely us, that reflect our inner worlds, that are a response to life, to the things that happen to us, to the people around us, and to our world.
There’s a purpose to everything within us, and our feelings are no different.
I’m not sure that there are negative and positive emotions, we might have been fed a spoonful of something with this.
I’d like to suggest that there are contractive and expansion expressions of every emotion.
The contractive expression is where we get stuck in it, where we live from it. The expansive expression is where we use the energy of it to do something, healing, look at it, change it.
If I’m an angry person, if everything I do is tinged with anger, I’m in the contractive expression. When I use my anger to examine myself, engage with it, question it, and use it to grow, to release, to expand, I’m in the expansive expression.
Last week I was talking about the purpose of these emotions, and one of the things that came to me was that feeling them, feeling my own loneliness, my own frustration, my own anger, whatever it, naming it, acknowledging it, being aware of it, creates compassion when someone else feels that. It’s a vulnerable space. And the compassion is where we connect with each other. I feel myself, I feel that within you. There’s an understanding, an acceptance. We can do things with that, we can talk, we can heal.
Feel everything, it’s all you.
Learn about the feelings, learn to be with them.
Feel to the depth of your being.
Allow them to move, to flow, through you, within you. Look to life and know the sun rises and the sun sets. The tide comes in and goes out. There are times of love and times of joy, times of sadness and tears. Be in life, be in yourself.
The gift of all this is loving yourself.
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