Our Emotions: Visitors with a Message - Part 2
Someone walked up to my door about half a year ago and told me I must leave my job. I didn’t let them finish their sentence before I slammed the door shut and went back to my job. They came again the next day. And the next day. They started yelling at me, so I started locking the door. I thought locking the door would make me feel more safe. But every day I spent inside my house I became more afraid, and I started to miss all the beauty outside of my door, even though it came with pain, too.
Imagine the visitor in that story was my best friend or partner. Then, wouldn’t it seem silly, maybe even rude, to slam the door shut? Even more, what if the visitor was someone a bit magical, someone who knew, even before I consciously knew, what was best for me?
The visitor at my door was myself. She was my Knowing, speaking in her language of emotions.
Emotions come knocking on our doors all day, every day. Their messages are not heard but felt. Here is the problem. Instead of feeling what is best for us, we think about what is best for us. One of my favorite quotes states that “the mind is a beautiful servant and a dangerous master.” In other words, our mind can be extremely useful as a passenger on our bus but a terrible driver.
In our Western, White Supremacist, Patriarchal, Capitalistic, society, we have been, tragically, conditioned to disconnect from our bodies and rely on our mind only. That is very convenient when trying to perpetuate systems of oppression, violence, and greed, keeping the masses disconnected from their Knowing and life force. Researchers have found that the human brain processes less than 50 bits per second (approximately the amount of information in 5 words), our senses, however, process about 11 million bits per second. When we disconnect from our emotions, we are shutting the door to visitors bringing us books of up-to-date information and, instead, choosing to rely only on pamphlets mailed to us last year.
Ignoring the call to quit my job is just one example of many times I have struggled to allow my emotional visitors inside. As a highly sensitive person (or even just a regular sensitive person), feeling can be overwhelming. And as a person in a messy, violent, painful world, feeling can be debilitating. This is where education on emotions and strategies to relate to our emotions become necessary.
We are not our emotions. I am not the sadness, fear, dread, guilt, and embarrassment I felt when realizing I needed time off from my job. I experienced sadness, which passed through telling me the system I was working in was flawed. I experienced fear, which passed through telling me I could give to others in a way that was more true and beautiful to who I am. I experienced dread, which passed through telling me life is too precious and short to exchange my health for money. I experienced guilt, which passed through telling me I was complicit with violence by ignoring my truth and staying silent. I experienced embarrassment, which passed through telling me I need to heal the parts of me that believe my worth is based on my productivity. In this way, we can relate to our emotion without being consumed by our emotion.
It is just as important that we do not attach to our emotions as it is important we do not resist them. We do not need to create a story about the emotion; we might not have to use our thinking mind at all. Just experience, breathe, give yourself compassion, and repeat.
I invite you to practice a a one-second technique I use and teach clients I work with that has helped me build space and tolerance in my body for emotion:
Breathe in the feeling of safety and peace of the current moment (this exact moment, not in one day or one second from now). You can pair this with a mantra - “Right now, I am safe”
Exhale your resistance to this current moment
Allow everything right now to be exactly as it is
Ok, maybe it’s a five-second practice.
With love and peace in the moment,
Kier
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/science/information-theory/Physiology
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