Loading the library…
We are taught to suppress hard feelings or be swept away by them. There is a third way: turning toward them with curiosity.
5 min readPart 4 of 4
The only way out is through.
Difficult emotions — anger, grief, fear, shame — arrive uninvited and rarely at convenient times. Faced with them, most of us learned one of two strategies as children: push the feeling down and pretend it is not there, or let it explode and be carried away by it.
Both strategies fail in the same way. A suppressed emotion does not disappear; it waits, and leaks out sideways. An emotion we are swept away by makes our decisions for us, often badly. There is a third path, and it begins with a surprising word: welcome.
An emotion is not an enemy. It is information. Fear points to something we value and might lose. Anger often points to a boundary that has been crossed. Grief is the shape love takes when something is gone. Shutting the messenger out means missing the message.
When a hard feeling arrives, try meeting it with curiosity rather than resistance:
Name it plainly: "This is anger." "This is fear."
Locate it in the body — the tight chest, the hot face, the heavy stomach.
Let it be there for a few breaths without acting on it or arguing with it.
This is not the same as approving of the feeling or acting on it. You are simply allowing it to exist long enough to be understood. Curiously, a feeling that is fully felt often begins to soften. It was the resistance, as much as the feeling, that caused the suffering.
You came looking for one answer. This is where it opens out.
Between the feeling and the action there is a gap, and in that gap lives your freedom. Suppression skips the gap by denying the feeling. Reaction skips it by obeying the feeling instantly. Turning toward the emotion widens the gap — and a wider gap means a wiser response.
You cannot always choose what you feel. But with practice, you can choose what you do next. That is not a small thing. It may be the whole of maturity.