“Your emotions are meant to fluctuate, just like your blood pressure is meant to fluctuate. It’s a system that’s supposed to move back and forth, between happy and unhappy. That’s how the system guides you through the world.”
Daniel Gilbert
I gave myself permission to feel and experience all of my emotions. In order to do that, I had to stop being afraid to feel. In order to do that, I taught myself to believe that no matter what I felt or what happened when I felt it, I would be okay.
Iyanla Vanzant
Emotions are what give our lives meaning and texture. To craft a life of meaning, we must pay attention to what we’re feeling.
In your next course, you’ll be exploring your emotional life a bit more deeply. In this lesson, I want to talk about how our emotions can be used as the fuel for our passions (as opposed to being driven around by our emotions.)
Perhaps what has brought you here is frustration — about where your life is going, or about where the world is going. Perhaps you were brought here by excitement about new adventures. Whether the emotions we feel are “positive” or “negative,” they can be helpful forms of insight into our lives.
Any time you are experiencing an emotion, it’s the body’s way of saying, “Something needs your attention!” Every emotion has what the experts call an “action tendency” — it is prompting us to move or take a particular action (e.g., sadness may prompt us to seek soothing, anger may prompt us to be aggressive, etc.) Even the emotions that are difficult or uncomfortable are there for a reason, and can ultimately inspire skillful action.
If you’re angry about something — a setback, a roadblock, the world… — feel your anger. If you’re sad, sit with the sadness. Don’t deny your suffering. Carl Jung said, “What you resist, persists.” When we resist the anger, it transforms into rage; when we ignore the pain it becomes hurt, inflicted on ourselves or others. When we hold space for our anger, or become curious about our pain, we can learn what they are trying to tell us.
I would encourage you, if you are feeling overwhelmed by setting your goals and intentions, or frustrated by your current situation, to sit with your anger or overwhelm or frustration. Where do you feel it? Is it in your heart, your stomach, your shoulders, your jaw? What does it feel like? Is it tight, cold, big, small, or heavy? Does it move or tremble or does it stay still?
Hold space for your emotion by just feeling it on a bodily level, without even trying to analyze it. For most people, when they do this they release a bit of the tension they are holding, and sometimes experience greater insights into the sources of their emotion.
When we see emotions as information, we can learn a lot from them.
Questions for investigating an emotion:
- What am I feeling?
- Where am I feeling it?
- What is it like? (try to “feel into” the emotion on a bodily level)
- What does it want to tell me?
- What does it want me to do?
Sometimes the answers will come easily, and sometimes it will be harder. But as I stated in the lessons last week, our emotions are often a helpful barometer of whether we are living in alignment with our intentions, and a helpful compass to point us toward where we need to head next.
As I stated, your next course will include lots of instruction about emotion. In the meantime, you may find the following articles helpful:
How to Use Mindfulness to Work With Difficult Emotions