Make peace with your difficult emotions
What emotions do you repeatedly struggle with? Is it anger, shame, anxiety, fear, or others? This year has been a year like no other, which exposed our negative emotions. However, if we don’t deal with them, we are likely to experience them again at a later time. It’s easy to escape difficult emotions because who wants to face them over and over again? But they can contain important messages, and when they keep resurfacing, it’s a sign that we need to heal or transform something in our lives. The pain and suffering we experience are only dangerous when they are far from us. What I mean by this? Our painful emotions are a danger because from a distance they cause us pain and suffering. But what if we become intimate with these feelings, instead of pushing them away?
That is, we get to know them on a deeper level, so we stop fighting and resisting them. For example, have you ever judged someone from afar, perhaps someone you didn’t like? So, did you meet them and find out that they were not what you imagined? In fact, they were nice and friendly. The same thing happens when we make friends with our difficult emotions. We invite painful feelings to come closer, and by doing so, we stop resisting them. Suddenly, they are no longer as scary or overwhelming as we once thought.
When you make peace with your difficult emotions, they no longer control you and you discover joy and freedom in your life. This freedom was always there, but difficult emotions obscured it. After all, painful emotions cannot control you when you are intimate with them because the role of an emotion is to move through you, not get caught up in your mind and body. Yet many people unknowingly hold on to negative emotions for years, even decades. In previous articles, I mentioned neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, who says that it takes two and a half minutes for an emotion to move through our nervous system.
Knowing this, it makes sense that we would get to know our emotions on a deeper level, instead of ignoring them. So to stop resisting difficult feelings, inhabit your body when they arise. For example, if you had a heated exchange with a friend or loved one and experienced fear and anger, move to the area of your body where these emotions are present and sit with them. Be with them until the emotion dissolves and you will discover an expansive energy of love, joy and freedom. People often ask me: how long does it take to be free of negative emotions? Will you come back once you have done this exercise?
Heal and transform the pain of your past
As mentioned above, it takes two and a half minutes for an emotion to be processed through our nervous system. However, if we have ignored our difficult emotions for years, it may take longer to process them. There have been times when I experienced anxiety that lasted 30 seconds and other times I experienced anger that lasted 30 minutes. It will depend on how long the emotion has been alive in our nervous system and if we are willing to face it. Remember: Difficult emotions teach us important lessons that we have ignored. They give birth to something that requires our attention, otherwise they will reappear, perhaps as a disease or disease, if we are not attentive.
Are you satisfied that difficult feelings don’t have to dominate your life? That you can make peace with them and learn the lessons they are trying to impart? This idea is worth having, so that you are not destined to repeat the same mistakes. To paint another analogy, what if someone kept showing up at your front door and you didn’t answer? They may reappear until you open the door to see who it is. This is what happens with our difficult emotions. They keep coming back and we turn them away because we don’t want to deal with them. But we must learn to embrace our negative emotions because they can help us learn about our past, so we don’t recreate it in the future.
So if you’ve had a history of bad relationships with previous partners, pushing your negative emotions away may cause them to surface again in your next relationship. After all, you want to be in a healthy, loving relationship with a like-minded person, right? So, it requires healing and transforming the pain of your past, so that you don’t recycle it in your next relationship. Otherwise, we will take our emotional baggage from the past and unload it on our future partner, claiming that it is their fault that they have triggered our painful wounds. But it’s not their fault because the wound was already there and your partner is simply illuminating the wound so you can heal and transform it. Therefore, to stop resisting your feelings of difficulty, open up to the messages they convey and you will realize that everything has worked perfectly for your highest good.
