Emotions are not good or bad, they just are.
What if you were always meant to feel it all?
No good feelings. No bad. Just feelings.
Emotions that vibrate through your body and then leave.
Like colors on a painter’s palette. The red is no better than the blue. The green no less desirable than the purple.
But somewhere along the way we picked up the idea that our paintings needed to only have certain colors in them.
Only the bright and shiny and light ones. No dark and deep and heavy.
Have you noticed though, how a life filled with only bright and shiny colors can seem empty?
Like eating cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
We are meant to have contrast.
It is in the very nature of all life around us. Birth and death. Sun and Moon. The tide coming in and pulling back out. Pain and relief.
When we try to live in opposition to the duality of life, we can end up feeling stifled. Like walking along the top of a fence, we stay so focused on being in the middle to try and limit the depth of our lows, that we unintentionally also limit the height of our highs.
This can show up in your life as a general sense of malaise, depression, a lack of joy or anticipation for the future, and having no deep personal dreams or goals.
Sometimes we become so focused on living the “perfect” life, that we don’t end up living a “life” at all.
But if we accept that life is 50/50. Two sides of the same coin. One cannot exist without the other. Then we can start living without fear of the dark colors that come our way. We can allow them, and feel them, knowing that they too shall pass.
Glennon Doyle describes this experience so beautifully in her chapter entitled “aches,”
“The Ache is not a flaw. The Ache is our meeting place. It’s the clubhouse of the brave. All the lovers are there. It is where you go alone to meet the world. The Ache is love. The Ache was never warning me: This ends, so leave. She was saying: This ends, so stay.”
Untamed, Glennon Doyle
This is your one human life. I guarantee it will be filled with the whole spectrum of emotion. That’s the very nature of this existence.