Feeling Better Requires Getting Better At Feeling: Full Interview

All emotions are healthy and necessary because of what they represent and what they alert us to, namely, the existence of comfort and discomfort, harmony and disharmony, ease and disease, pleasure and pain.

We sowed the seeds for an adversarial relationship with our emotions when we decided to discriminate and introduce the idea that some were “negative” and others “positive”, some “right” and others “wrong”. When we decided to sit in judgement and categorize emotions in this way, we changed our relationship with what is one of the most reliable sources of feedback and most valuable sources of truth we have access to.

Despite what happens, our emotions are not against us. They are as much a natural - albeit unconscious - part of our make up as the rise and fall of our chest as we breathe, and the ebb and flow of our oxygen-filled blood that courses through our veins, neither of which we consciously partake in and yet both of which are vital to our survival.

Our emotions give us the opportunity to connect with our authenticity and allow it to emerge into the world. When we decline this invitation, our body can let us know through the surfacing of sometimes dramatic and at other times subtle symptoms whose origins lie in what can be referred to as unhealed emotional wounds, bruises, and scars. There’s wisdom in every one of these emotional wounds, insight in every single emotional scar, and benefit in each emotional bruise… IF we are willing to seek and find it.

It is when we fail to honestly and fully express how our emotional pain makes us feel that we increase the intensity of that very same pain. Pain reduction, therefore, is aided and achieved through the honest, appropriate, and full expression of everything we feel about that pain.

In the wake of accepting this premise, it follows that every honest emotion can be considered a positive emotion.

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