Fullness of Life

We all desire to feel the full richness of our aliveness. Yet many of us attempt to block out one side of the experience, dulling and blunting our complete aliveness. In order to embrace all of life we must also embrace the aspects of life we do not desire to feel. The pain and suffering aspect to life of fear, anger, jealousy, and any other emotion we have labeled as negative and that we attempt to avoid at all costs. 

One of the first things we will do to embrace all of life is to erase the label of bad or negative on any emotion or feeling, and instead understand that at their root they are simply sensations. These sensations are gifting us an opportunity to fully feel our aliveness and come back into the present moment. They are a necessary step to experience in order to open us to the complete aliveness and to feel more of the desired emotions such as peace, gratitude, and joy.

Although we should all remove these labels, for the sake of simplicity and communicating my point I will use the label “negative” to convey an emotional state that is less than desirable throughout this writing.

I’ve come to realize the fighting or avoiding of any “negative” emotion immediately worsens and deepens the very emotion we are trying not to feel. Yet as soon as we can accept, surrender, and allow these emotions to be felt they subside into something much more pleasurable.

When in emotional state arises that is less then desirable, we have 3 options. They are as follows:

Option 1 is to avoid this negative emotion at all cost by attempting to fight or shut this emotion down. This will cause a constriction in your body and if successful in shutting down this emotion you will have shut down your entire emotional body, closing off all emotions not just this one. The body does not have a filter of “good” vs. “bad” emotions that you can turn off just one side of emotions. It’s either all or nothing. So if you do decide to completely close down emotions and feeling out of fear or rejection of an emotion they all close down. You become incapable of feeling anything in that moment. It may be a temporary relief from the emotion you were avoiding but once you have closed down your body and feeling you then shift into a pure mental state. This is a state that many of us find ourselves in today. Closed off from our emotions and dwelling just in our minds. Too much energy in the mind results in a racing mind with endless thoughts, stress, inability to act or think clearly, amongst many other undesirable experiences.

Option 2 is similar to option 1 where you attempt to fight and avoid this perceived negative emotion at all cost. The difference is rather than being successful at closing down your entire emotional body, now you constrict but your emotions remain online. Enhancing and exponentially increasing the very emotion you are attempting to avoid. The energy of fighting and avoiding it actually feeds the emotion and catapults you much deeper into this undesirable state. This can become a negative loop. Let’s say for example the emotion we are trying to avoid is fear. We feel the emotion of fear coming on and we constrict or fear the fear. Fearing the fear pushes us deeper and enhances the amount of fear we are experiencing. We then begin to fear even more the new level of fear we are in and then the cycle repeats digging us deeper and deeper. I’m sure many of us have felt this experience and recognize the truth that it can go dark and deep rapidly when we fear the fear or fight and resist any emotion.

Option 3 is we recognize that this emotion is coming online and rather than constricting and attempting to avoid it we choose expansion over constriction. We take a deep breath into the emotion and with our awareness we simply observe the emotion. We allow the emotion to fully enter into our body with our accepting awareness on it. Allowing the ourselves to fully feel this emotion. By allowing it to be fully felt and surrendering into the emotion it can almost immediately be transmuted into a higher expression of emotion. The emotion simply wants to be felt. Feel it and you can move in harmony with your emotions. Avoid it and you are fighting an aspect of self creating internal turmoil and conflict.

It may sound paradoxical and that’s because it is. Fight the emotion and it can swallow you whole. Accept the emotion and it can be felt and almost immediately transmuted.

It is not always easy, but it is simple. When an emotion arises that we do not want to feel we either have an opportunity to allow it to be felt and bring us back into the present moment or we constrict and hide which often makes the experience much worse. If we can choose trust and surrender it always subsides.

Remember, no emotion is “bad” or “negative”, they are simply sensations. Gifts bringing us back into our aliveness. Only our perception, reaction, and expression of emotion can be anything negative. If we perceive and react to an emotion negatively they then have power over us and can negatively impact ourselves and others. The expressions of an emotion can only be negative when you’re directing that expression at another being. For example, if you are experiencing anger and you want to yell at the top of your lungs this is completely harmless and can help you feel this anger and allow it to express. If you instead direct that anger at another being and yell at them or even worse react by getting physical you have now completely allowed an emotion to have control over you and expressed it in a way to bring hurt or harm to another being.

It is only in our perception, reaction, and expression of emotion that can be anything negative, the emotion itself is not negative.

We don’t have to control how we are feeling, we just have to allow ourselves to feel. Be honest and open to whatever is arising in the moment regardless of our mood or emotions and let them be present within us.

The trippiest thing of all… the emotion that is arising might not even be from anything in the present moment. Our entire unconscious is filled with repressed and suppressed emotions from our entire life time of experiences. What is coming online may be from something in the past resurfacing in this moment as an opportunity for you to feel it, accept it, and integrate it.

You have to feel it to heal it.