On powerful feelings in a world that doesn’t know what to do with them
So often, when we feel something forcefully, we judge the crap out of ourselves. “This again!? I thought I was done with this. I don’t have time to feel this way.” And we deny the Feeling the right to exist. Or, we confuse the Feeling with the story we’ve always told about why we feel that way and what it means. We feel a surge of anger and are transported right back to our childhood. We feel sadness and assume we have to cry, or we can’t cry, because that’s just the way we are. Or perhaps we rush to categorize the Feeling, to put a label on it, to make it less amorphous, more manageable.
What if, instead of all that, we did something truly radical? What if, instead of raising our defenses, we softened and made space for the Feeling? What if we welcomed it, held it, and truly felt it, with as much compassion as we can muster?
These days, I am learning that, when we do this difficult work, not only do Feelings pass more quickly and leave less destruction in their wake…they also have so much more to teach us.