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For a long time I struggled with the concept of negative and positive emotions.
Firstly, once we’ve decided something is negative or positive we put it in a box with a whole lot of labels. We can’t get more from it or learn from it because of the judgement we’ve put on it.
Then we separate ourselves from what we call the negative, we disconnect,
From that I started using the terms expansive and contractive emotions. Some expand us, open us, and some shut us down.
Last week I reached a new understanding of emotions, and the extension of that, every situation, every person, everything in our lives.
Let’s stick to the emotions to explain it.
Every emotion has a contractive and expansive expression.
The contractive is when we get stuck in it, when the story becomes increasingly important, when we act from it, when we define ourselves by the emotion. It shuts us down, closes possibilities, separates and disconnects us. The emotion owns us, controls us. We are reactive, there’s no choice.
The expansive expression opens us to possibility. We feel it, to the deepest extent we can, we name it, we own it. This allows it to move through us, we grow with it. We’re not stuck in the story, we’re not trying to change it. We respond with choice. The emotion is ours.
The more we try and change it the greater the resistance to change there is, the greater the struggle becomes. It drains us.
The expansion is a surrender. There’s growth, there’s learning. Our perspective widens, we see more than we did. This frees us. To feel, to be to live.
And to love.
In the expansive space everything changes, it becomes an opportunity for us to go deeper into ourselves, into the world and into life.
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