I have always been a person who denies the more unpleasant feelings in my being. I am comfortable with joy, happiness, peace, and love. I’ve always tried my best to push any other emotions away. I didn’t like how they felt. Sadness leaves a heaviness and sharp pain in my chest.
Anger makes me feel hot and out of control and has occasionally led to fury and obsessive thinking. Last year, during an intensive week of emdr (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), I learned that having these feelings are not a bad thing.
The emdr therapist taught me to treat them like I would loved ones by acknowledging their existence and listening with an open mind. I was able to let go of many old wounds by practicing this. I realized the harder to feel emotions deserved to be respected just as much as the feel-good emotions.
I learned to hold sacred space in my being, where I enter the presence of my emotions with humility and respect. I assure them they have the room to say and feel whatever they want, with no judgment from me. This began the start of a newfound relationship with myself.
For the first time, I felt myself becoming more whole, more united. I felt the gratitude my emotional body showed me in return and its relief to finally be heard. I was filled with awe that such a simple practice could make such a profound difference in my life.
As I got better at seeing what was occurring in my emotions, I realized there were some I was still unconsciously pushing away. These are the emotions we’re taught it’s not okay to feel and that we have to resist. I’m talking about the emotions of betrayal, resentment, ill will, and bitterness.
I don’t feel those emotions too often, and when I do, I push them away with everything I have. I tell myself, “this isn’t me. A good person doesn’t entertain those sorts of emotions.” So, in turn, I resisted allowing myself to feel them with the reasoning that I was doing myself a favor.
But I realized it didn’t matter because they had a way of seeping through anyway. I saw I was repressing these emotions the same way I had with sadness and anger. So I decided to hold sacred space with these troubling emotions to see what would happen. I was very nervous.
I had never done anything like this before and didn’t know what to expect. I was more than a little afraid. I gave myself over to them completely for days and let them have their say. This felt incredibly uncomfortable, and it seemed like it wasn’t helping anything.
It brought to mind the image of a festering wound. I felt the wound becoming more infected as the anger grew more forceful. My mind became a jumbled haze of confusion. Nothing seemed to make sense. So I decided to re-open sacred space and dive into my being.
I asked my higher self to help me see the situation clearly and honestly. I started asking myself questions so I could get to the bottom of what was really going on. I went down several rabbit holes, and during one of them, an epiphany struck like lightning.
I realized all that resentment and ill will was coming from my ego. My ego had been severely bruised and needed justification to lash out at the perceived injustice it felt it had endured.
This realization brought me a wave of relief because once I knew it was my ego causing such a ruckus, I recognized that the majority of the pain I was feeling stemmed from obscured lies. With this awareness, the truth began to dissipate the thoughts that carried the lies because lies cannot withstand the light of truth.
They dissolved one by one into the vibration of love and understanding. I see now that anger comes in different shapes and sizes. Some anger is sacred and can spur us to make the hard choices we need to make, and other times it is naturally destructive and should be released as soon as possible.
But we won’t know which one it is until we do some digging within ourselves. Only then will we have the ability to see what our emotions are trying to tell us about our state of being, our surroundings, and our relationships. Listening within has the power to change how we see everything.
I’m happy that I took the time to tune in to the emotions ravaging my body; otherwise, I may never have found any answers and would have continued to think there was something wrong with me or that I’m a bad person for the feelings I was experiencing. This situation showed me how multidimensional I am.
I have been on a spiritual journey for about 4-5 years now, and I have learned some incredible things about humanity’s divinity. We are divine beings having a human experience. It was incredibly humbling to feel firsthand how many layers there are to being a human and how important it is not to judge what we are feeling.
Society teaches there are good emotions and negative emotions. This causes us to fear the negative emotions and also fear ourselves for feeling them. This black and white thinking causes a lot of unnecessary pain. Emotions are energy in motion, and they of themselves are neither good nor bad.
It is what we do with them and how we act on them that can cause harm to ourselves and others if we are not careful. Sitting with them gives us the chance to learn what is happening deep within our being and cultivate a relationship with that aspect of ourselves. All emotions are alive and sacred.
We can honor them by sitting quietly, listening without judgment, and allowing them to have a voice. By opening sacred space with the intention that the truth be revealed, we can listen and decide what the best course of action is. In this way, can we best love and serve ourselves and each other.
Quotes:
The acceptance of what is honestly felt is the moral equivalent of the vision that whatever exists is a manifestation of the divine. – Alan watts
Rather than seeing an enemy, we see an energy trapped in the ailment that needs to be liberated and returned to source through the heart of love and compassion. Restored to its former glory. In this, there is great power. – Ahtayaa Leigh
Anger delivers our boundaries to us. Our boundaries deliver our beliefs to us. Our beliefs determine how we experience the world. So even though it can be scary, we’d be wise to answer the door. – Glennon Doyle
If you deny the existence of your fault or error, it will strengthen its hold over you. If you recognize it, your awareness will destroy it. He who rejects this will never know the entrance to the temple. – Schwaller de Lubicz
When you are not resisting yourself or resisting life, there is less resisting what you need as it comes to you. – Alana Fairchild