Welcoming All the Emotions

Isn’t it great that the universe consistently provides me with opportunities to practice what I preach?

Yay?

So when I go on about being present with yourself and facing your feelings, naturally I get dished up the perfect situations to dive in and do just that.

A brief bit of context here. I’ve been exploring the realm of internet dating, despite previous disasters. Sometimes on cold, wintery nights it seems like a good idea. It’s brutal, tedious, and hilarious, often all at once, and several of my friends are probably bored with my tales.

The short story is that I met someone I liked. I allowed myself to feel that attraction, which fueled my interactions with an expansive, playful energy that was most enjoyable. However, disappointment arose pretty quickly, perhaps exacerbated by the longing for connection intersecting with a living, breathing man who had potential to participate.

Ugh. The potential. I’m such a sucker for that.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

The disappointment I felt was disproportionate to the situation. I mean, one great date did not merit the emotional upheaval that I experienced. That’s because the small disappointment that this potential would remain unfulfilled activated the archives of unprocessed disappointment stored within me.

I was feeling the sadness of a lifetime of suppressed disappointment. And it sucked. There were tears and a few sleepless nights, fatigue, crankiness, and malaise. Mostly just a dull ache, but occasionally it crescendoed into intense grief.

The difference is that this time, I met with the disappointment and welcomed it.

I find it helpful to personify emotions, and this felt like a 5 year-old girl who was sad and just needed someone to care that she was sad.

Not to tell her why she shouldn’t be sad, try to take away the sadness, or go get some ice cream.

Just to be with her and feel sad together.

So, to the best of my ability, I did. I sat in the dark with the pain. I danced with it in my living room. We went on walks together.

Very different from the cultural messages that bombard us about dealing with emotions. We’re taught to stay busy (avoid), have a few drinks (numb), push it all down (suppress) or fling it about, inflicting others with the shrapnel (project).

And let’s not forget the message that can be delivered in more mindful circles: the spiritual bypass. Oh, this is a tricky bugger! It highjacks spiritual practices and universal truths with the goal of avoiding, numbing, suppressing or even projecting.

Yes, it is absolutely true that this disappointment was (eventually) in my highest good, that there was a lesson within, that I was better off without this particular guy. True, true, and true. But if I jump to those consolation prizes without feeling the hurt, I’ve abandoned that little girl and effectively suppressed the energy of the emotions, storing them as fuel for future upsets.

It’s entirely possible to use spiritual practices as a way of avoiding feelings instead of a way to awaken to the truth of one’s being. I can meditate, chant, or pray to tune in or tune out. It’s possible to employ any activity in the pursuit of escape, even those that have been designed to foster connection.

Somewhere in the midst of all this is a healing path. I’m grateful for my devoted efforts at putting my soul in charge, as it made it easy-ish for me to let her take the lead. Here’s an attempt at describing what emerged, although it was not even a remotely linear plan. Imagine a 3D flow chart designed by M.C. Escher.

Regulate my nervous system so I’m not approaching this with the energy of struggle or feeling like my survival is a stake.

Make space and time to meet with myself and allow the feelings to come up.

Don’t identify as the feelings. Yes, I’m feeling sadness and disappointment, but that is not the truth of my being; just a temporary state. Somewhere in between aversion and attachment is a sweet spot where we can welcome everything that comes up without running away from it or letting it run away with us.

Express the feelings and the energy behind them through words (journaling is a no-harm way of getting the words out without projecting) or movement (I enjoy bouncing on my rebounder with invigorating music). Rather than letting the thoughts spin, putting them on paper or dancing them out helps me to process and prevent them from becoming new patterns.

Know my limits so that I’m not overwhelming myself. Regulating the nervous system helps, but there were also times when I needed to call a timeout and do something altogether different. It can help to have a funny video cued up for times like these.

Don’t get wrapped up in the stories my ego-mind is trying to tell me about what this experience means about me as a person, my worth or my future.

Don’t catastrophise! Or maybe just a little. Rein it in before getting to the part where I live under a bridge with a herd of cats.

Use my tools with an intention to heal rather than to sidestep the pain. Reiki is my go-to process for metabolizing emotions so the energy can flow through me rather than getting stuck and high-jacking me unexpectedly in the future. I also delved into a helpful meditation that I’ll share as an audio for paid subscribers later this week. The goal is to alchemize the energy instead of avoiding it or letting it run the show.

Cultivate curiosity and self-compassion. This is not a time to analyze what went wrong and how to do things differently. Sure, that can be helpful, but it’s not the same as meeting and allowing emotions. And it is never a good time to judge and berate oneself.

Accept all the emotions that rise up. We cannot have wholeness if we reject any part of ourselves. So finding the grace to meet the uncomfortable emotions is part of the healing journey.

Invite the divine into my practice, surrendering the pain and uncertainty to be healed by a higher power. I don’t need to do this work by myself. But I do need to witness the emotions and be willing to let go of the upset. This is probably the most important piece, but without the other steps, it could easily become another bypass technique.

Essentially, I did none of the things that I had learned growing up! There is a sense of liberation that comes from letting the soul lead and going an entirely different route. What I’ve learned in my Reiki practice is that we can feel fully or not, but we don’t get to selectively choose which feelings we experience. So if I block out the sadness, I also miss out on the joy.

While cleaning out the backlog of disappointment has not been a jolly good time, it does make it possible that future jolliness will be available to me. The path of meeting our feelings is not always pleasant, but it is real. And for me, that’s what it’s all about.

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