Resistance

Trying to control your emotions is such a waste of energy!

I have been feeling quite emotionally dead for the past days. It’s a feeling that traps you mentally and makes you feel a little detached from your life. It’s something that happens to me very often, which I call “Tortoise moments”. I’m the turtle who retracts inside her shell, but always gets stuck inside.

I racked my brain, as I often do, to find out why I was feeling this way: lack of exercise, my attention deficit, too much time on my hands, too many things to do… These answers all sounded plausible, but I knew none of them were the culprit.

UNTIL TODAY.

You know, you learn wise things in life that you feel are easy to apply, but then the subject of these lessons sneak up on you with dark cloaks of anonymity, and you’re fooled.

To explain, I found out, through a nice conversation, that the reason why I felt so weird was because I was resisting my emotions. Can you guess that resisting leads nowhere?

I was doing that because I have read so many times that when you feel negatively about something, you have to convince yourself that the emotion has no place. You have to look at it from a different angle in order to see the positive side of the event. All in all, negative emotions are to be tricked by becoming “mature” or “awake”; telling yourself that they’re nonsense.

Well, maybe it works for some but it certainly doesn’t work for me.

My emotions are there whether I want them to or not. I could judge, repress, ignore or trick them, but they would still be there, intact and waiting to be felt.

That’s the key here: Waiting to be felt.

I had not let myself feel the way I was feeling! I was sad, but I didn’t want to be, so I ignored it. Telling myself that I shouldn’t be sad was useless; I was sad. I needed to be sad, but I was instead judging sadness as a useless immature emotion. What I had to do to feel better was to accept what I felt, not resist it!

So I sat down at my desk, and I wrote down all of the many reasons I felt blue. Any reason. From work, to life, to temperature, anything! Letting it out felt great. Then I took a breath, read them again, and wrote down why I felt this way about it, to see the core reasons of my sorrow.

This simple exercise made me feel so much peace. One, I could let the feelings out, because we all know every emotion needs to be expressed! Repressing them or controlling them never works. Two, I could clearly see all of the reasons why I felt this way. This helped me figure out ways to get these reasons out of my life, or accept them entirely. I can’t be happy all the time. Not everything can keep me satisfied. Some things will suck. As long as these things are incredibly useful (like work), then I’ll have to accept them. This gave me the freedom I needed to go on with peace.

Are there emotions that you’re resisting, waiting to be expressed? Well, Take a piece of paper, and write it down; write it all down.