Your Emotions Are Trying To Help You
How We Can Live A Lighter Life By Tuning In To What We Feel
Emotions help us understand life on a deeper level.
Though, we often look at them as an inconvenience.
We think thoughts like:
“Ugh, I can’t believe I’m getting emotional right now.”
“It’s frustrating when I feel this way.”
“I’d prefer to just not feeling anything right now.”
We react to our emotions like this for a few reasons. For one, intense emotional spikes are rare. Since we only feel our emotional peaks ever so often, we aren’t used to the sensation of them. So, we get overwhelmed when we feel their intensity. When we are overwhelmed, we don’t feel in control. And when we feel out of control, we feel fearful and shut down or panic.
Another reason we react negatively to our emotions is because we simply misunderstand why they exist.
Modern culture has given emotions a weird role to play. We’ve been taught that they exist for other people rather than us. That is to say that we’ve been groomed to think that emotions only exist to show other people how we feel. This has caused generations of people to perform their emotions for (or at) others, numb their emotions so they are hidden, or become disconnected from their feelings altogether.
Emotions don’t exist to inconvenience or embarrass us. And they certainly don’t exist to be used as social signaling or manipulation tools. Emotions exist to give us a deeper understanding of our own human experience. They are to be felt, listened to, and reflected upon.
Emotional maturity is hearing the wisdom in your feelings rather than just reacting to their energy.
When you feel any kind of emotion, large or small, it’s not just a wave of physical sensation that’s come to mess up your flow, make you cry at an inopportune time, or go carelessly bounding through a field of flowers in a possessed state of joy.
Emotions are information, just like our thoughts. They simply speak a different language.
If you wake up in the morning, see your partner lying there sleeping, and feel a wealth of love rising inside you, it isn’t just a “feeling of love.” It’s also a profound, complex message from within, signaling that you’re with the right person, have cultivated a healthy relationship, and have opened yourself up to a meaningful connection.
On the other hand, if you feel a bit heavy every time you go to grab that fourth glass of wine, it could be your emotions trying to make you aware that you’re using the extra wine as a way to numb something in your life that you have yet to acknowledge.
Practice slowing down when you feel emotions arise inside you.
Whether pleasant or challenging, allow their energy to pass through you like a cloud moving through the sky. Then, listen. Hear what your feelings are trying to tell you. By opening yourself up to their deeper wisdom, you won’t only come to understand that your emotions are on your side–you’ll also start living a more light, enlightened, and intune life.
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Wow! You hit this one on the head. Great message that I needed to hear 💜
Beautifully written, Cory! Love the last point about slowing down. Sometimes we are so sped up in our mind that we don’t even pick up on how we are really feeling.
I see our emotions like a guidance system. Just like how our skin has sensory receptors to know when to let go of a hot object. When I’m feeling really off, I know there’s something I need to let go of