As our emotions serve as the fuel for our inner creative force, it is important for us to experience them and allow them to flow in order to understand them.
We often learn from an early age that some emotions are negative, harmful, or undesirable. As a result we have developed ways to surpress these unwanted feelings. Boys are taught in our society that it is not appropriate to cry or appear vulnerable through their emotions. Anger is frequently labeled as being negative and unwelcome. Yet all these emotions have their genesis, and to stifle their expression or deny their existence is to surrender the opportunity to use their powerful force to align ourselves with our own creative energy.
That is not to say that we would do well to fully act on our emotional state without discretion or restraint. Rather, it is to acknowledge our feelings as valid, even embracing them and our right to their presence in us as a natural byproduct of the expression of who we are as unique individuals. To surpress our feelings is to say we are not entitled to that which we truly desire in life.
While we can intellectualize what any given emotion means for us we will fall short of discovering our personal truth until we allow it to run its natural course. Emotions function like currents of a body of water, they propel us in a given direction based on the desires that gave birth to the emotional state. Only upon embracing our right to the emotions will we find the current carrying us to our goals. To deny their right to exist is akin to fastening our intentions to a heavy weight and sinking it to the depths of the lake of emotions, only to remain adrift on the stillness of stoicism, moving in no particular direction.
Though an emotion may be uncomfortable, it is not an indication that it is wrong. It is functioning as does a grain of sand in an oyster. The oyster embraces the irritant rather than denying its existence, from which is produced a wondrous pearl of beauty and value.
