Emotions: The Great Taboo.
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All emotions and feelings are beautiful. For instance, anger can be great, and fear can be a warning from our body.
I never understood why we have labeled certain emotions good or bad, and judged them as the cause for our life’s pain. What if it is not the feelings and emotions, but the way we choose to experience them? What if we were always open, so everything comes in and everything comes out?
Everything is energy, or whatever word you prefer to use. Nothing can harm an open heart unless we try to control it and take away the natural flow of life. Allow your heart, your body, your emotions to just be. There is only fluidity in them, and pain can be an awesome tool.
However, if we have already judged it before we feel it, it solidifies and no longer stays as energy, like wind floating around. Instead, it becomes like a rock — blocked, unmoving, trapped. It has no escape. It becomes something else. The natural movement and rhythm of your body is stopped. Now it needs to grab your attention, huffing and puffing to get out.
I don’t like that feeling, you say. You deny it, and blame it for making you feel uncomfortable and not nice. That makes it speak louder. You begin to suffer and deny it even more without acknowledging that it is a part of you, that it’s your body desiring your attention and your care.
That’s all it is: a piece of you (and I am not talking about when we are picking up on other people’s emotions and they are not ours). No matter how much you push it away, it will follow you everywhere. We cannot run away from ourselves.
Emotions then come in the way of caring, the one affects the other. Whenever a part of our self is suppressed, it will affect our caring for others as we are not caring for ourselves. The solidifying compromises our openness.
Look at children or babies, for example. When they are upset, they express it, and it usually lasts a few minutes. A baby will scream, crying its eyes out, and 10 minutes later, be giggling and smiling. It is able to smile afterwards, and feel as if nothing happened, because the emotion was felt, expressed and released. Otherwise, it would just keep building up, and the baby’s smiles would keep getting replaced more and more by irritability.
What do we do usually do to children though immediately when a feeling arises? We become uncomfortable, diving into our selves. We cannot handle it, so we try to stop it by saying Don’t cry. We get angry because we don’t know what to do. It scares us as we feel helpless. In turn, the child thinks he did something wrong by expressing their feeling, and it becomes a bad thing. Crying, being upset, angry, sad… it is all taught to be wrong.
Emotions become a bad thing, and no longer stay a natural part of life. We begin to fear them, judge them… avoid them. A part of us is suppressed, and we are not whole.
It’s like a small knot in our bodies that only gets larger and larger unless we release it. The bigger it becomes, the more uncomfortable we get, and the more difficult it becomes to release it. It is not an alien creature, an enemy trying to harm us, it is us… it is us caring for ourselves. It is our beauty, our sensitivity, vulnerability… our gift of being human.
We have learned that it is bad, making us feel bad in turn. Guilt comes along for feeling something because you should not be feeling that! Guilt makes us deny it, or we explode, express it and then feel worse inside for making the other person feel bad.
The belief that emotions are bad becomes stronger. They seem harmful. However, we explode when the large pile of emotions, built up over years of suppression, maybe even from childhood, finally finds a release, and almost always on the wrong person and situation. Maybe if we were aware of it, we could laugh about it, laugh at ourselves, use it to dive deeper into the discovery of self, rather than closing it off even more.
What if the emotion just is?
Man, will we ever learn?
How come there is no war among animals? No blame, no shame? Because if they feel something, they show it. It is what it is.
For instance, when a wolf cub bites its mother, the mother turns around, grabs it by the neck and growls. The cub continues joyfully on its journey, the mother too. There is no suppression, judgment of feelings. They are who they are, not who they think they should be or how they should act… and so they are happy. They are being. There is peace. There is no disharmony.
By fearing our emotions ourselves, and judging them, we deny the others the freedom to express theirs as well, and we continue this insane cycle, keeping the world’s madness going. Are you ready to let go of the madness? The suppression? The war on emotions, feelings, and life? Yourself? Your nature? Your being?
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Gaia (Γαία) Giakalli is a therapist, writer, photographer, dancer, cultural anthropologist and nature-dweller. She loves creativity, and nature, especially trees. Her passion is connecting people with nature, in which she has spent most of her life in solitude, contemplating and enjoying its wisdom, and empowering people to be their authentic selves, reconnecting them to their true essence and calling in life. You can connect with her on The Tree Mouseion of Creativity, Gaia Giakalli World Productions, Facebook, Twitter or her blog.
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