We are often taught very early on to control our emotions, sometimes even to repress them: anger, grief, jealousy and many emotions described as “negative” had to be suppressed so as not to derogate from family or social conventions. The more “positive” perceived emotions such as joy, excitement, pleasure were better tolerated, on the condition that they did not exceed the family standards in intensity.
However, emotions are the body language that always tells us what is going on inside us. No emotion is neither positive nor negative. It’s what we do with it that makes it difficult sometimes! Rather than repressing them, we could listen to them, welcome them and surf with them. Because an unexpressed emotion is imprinted in the body and will come out sooner or later in a less pleasant form like an illness, a depression, any problem.
Let us learn to trust that our emotions will always bring us to a better point of equilibrium if we let them express themselves, without judgment and without resistance. When we judge an emotion to be negative, our resistance attracts it even more. This resistance can reinforce the emotion and sometimes even crystallize it solidly in us. She may then take up more space and go out inappropriately at equally inappropriate times. We thus reinforce the very emotion that we want to get rid of. When we react beyond measure to an event that we are experiencing, it is undoubtedly an old emotion that is constantly repressed and can no longer be trapped in our bodies.
Whereas if we let the emotions flow through us, observing them without judging them – “like? I feel frustrated ”- and that we accept to feel here right now this very emotion which has a message for us, it goes it’s way much faster than if we resist it. By welcoming it, we don’t have to fight it; we look at it, we feel it, we can even see where it is located in our body, where it originates, and we open ourselves to the message that it wants to transmit to us. Then we let her go. Without drama, without injury, without blame, without guilt. Simply by living it in the present moment.
In the end, we realize that very few emotions persist in us when we let them go. In fact, emotion is eliminated in 90 seconds by our brain. The rest of the time, it is we who feed it, who dramatize it, who nourish it. So let it slowly pass its way: our body and our mind will be better!
