Your negative emotions aren’t what you think they are
“It’s not the emotion itself that hurts. It’s your resistance to it that does. “
“It’s not the emotion itself that hurts. It’s your resistance to it that does. “
Intro
Whether you’re aware of it or not, your mind is constantly telling you stories about your emotions.
“This feeling is dangerous.”
“This will overwhelm me.”
“I can’t feel this.”
Over time, these stories harden into beliefs, and the beliefs run your decisions, your relationships, and your sense of what’s possible.
A Parable: The Boy and the River
There was once a boy who was terrified of the river.
He had fallen in once as a child and remembered the cold shock, the pull of the current. Ever since, he would tense up the moment he got near the water. His shoulders locked, his breath shortened, and his legs shook. Even standing on the bank felt unbearable.
One day, an old ferryman watched him shiver beside the shallows. “The river isn’t touching you,” the ferryman said. “Yet look how much you suffer.”
The boy insisted the river was dangerous. The ferryman stepped in, knee-deep, perfectly calm. “The water is cold,” he said, “but not cruel.”
He invited the boy to place one foot in. The boy hovered over the surface, muscles coiled, breath held tight. His foot barely grazed the water, yet the effort of bracing made his whole body tremble. “Feel that?” the ferryman said. “That is the pain of your resistance. The cold is nothing compared to your fight against it.”
The boy stood there for another ten minutes before he finally let his foot slip under. The cold shock came. Sharp, clean, and alive. The more he felt it, the more his muscles relaxed. Then it was just water. The boy stood there, ankle-deep, enjoying the water as it rushed around him. The ferryman watched him.
He smiled. The river moved past them both.
Your emotions aren’t the problem
It’s your resistance to emotions that makes them a problem. When you repress them, manage them, or try to control them, they begin to distort. They stop being guides and start becoming “burdens.”
For example:
When you resist fear: It becomes chronic anxiety. You spin in worst-case scenarios. You freeze when it’s time to act. You overthink every move.
When you resist sadness: It becomes angst and numbness. You get stuck, you stop trusting yourself, and you lose touch with what matters.
When you resist anger: It becomes self-criticism, passive aggression, or explosive anger AT someone. Over time, it can turn into depression (anger turned inwards).
Unresisted, your emotions hold the key to your freedom
When you learn to feel your emotions without resisting them, you begin to realize that they hold the keys to your freedom.
Feeling your fear dissolves anxiety. It’s not the panic or overwhelm that we often associate it with. We discover that fear is just excitement without the breath. If we feel it fully, it can be an exuberance for life.
Feeling your sadness unlocks vitality. We’ve all cried and seen that at the end of a good cry, when we don’t judge ourselves for how we cried or judged ourselves for feeling sad, we feel much better.
Feeling your anger often transforms stuckness and reduces self-criticism. Unresisted, it’s not the chaotic, destructive force we often associate with anger. It is a clarity and determination. It points you to what you care about. Because you don’t get angry about anything you don’t care about.
Big Love,
Joe