How to Feel Your Feelings
Our emotions are neutral messengers and it is up to interpret their message. Each emotion serves a purpose and is present for a reason. Our Bodies don't elicit emotional responses for no reason - there is always a purpose they serve, whether conscious or not. There is no such thing as good or bad emotions - the binary of goodness and badness keep us from integrating the medicine of each emotion.
Emotions can and do coexist with each other, without cancelling each other out. Anger often protects sadness because sadness is vulnerable. We can love and resent our parents at the same time because relationships are complex. Emotions are not logical or linear and they aren't supposed to be. They are informative - and they are. peep this caption below for a Dragon Ball Z 90s throwback analogy for emotions
Quantum mechanics informs how much we don’t know about how we relate to the Universe. What I love most about Quantum Physics is it has Ph.D educated experts in the field saying, “I don’t know”. This is the Dunning-Krueger effect in action: the more we know, the more we realize is Unknown. Our emotions are a world of Unknown - a vast ocean of wisdom waiting to be discovered.
Heisenberg’s Theory of Uncertainty describes the magic of therapy. In Heisenberg’s theory, he posits that electrons are always in motion, behaving with the motion of waves, until they are measured. The act of measurement forces the electrons to choose a path, to become Real. In the same way, our pain can be buzzing around our atmosphere, ringing in our ear like tinnitus. The magic of therapy is in naming our pain, recognizing our pain; the act of Naming our pain makes it drop into our hand a single particle and stop its incessant buzzing. Naming our pain disempowers our pain, returning it into our integrated energy body.
As we name our emotions, we are able to respond to them. After all, emotions are just messengers - it’s up to us to interpret their message.
Feeling our feelings is easier said than done, largely thanks to Cartesian dualism, emotions are in our collective shadow. Also thanks to doctrinal religion, anger is most especially in our collective shadow. Feeling our emotions with validation is the conscious corrective experience our inner child needs. And fortunately, we can even retroactively validate what our inner child needs because time & space aren’t linear. Let Neils Bohr explain.
Neils Bohr discovered how electrons move around the nucleus only in prescribed orbits. These electrons can jump from one orbit to another, without traversing space or time. We are a collection of electrons, moving from one orbit to another as we Choose our path in life. Our Bodies are always moving toward Wholeness and Life offers generous Invitations for us to change our Orbit, to revolve around authenticity. Life simply keeps offering Invitations until we are ready. Our whole Being changing orbit is a new carnation within the same lifetime, a Quantum Leap into your Self.
Schrödinger confirms the wave motion of particles with an equation. We often intellectualize our emotions, dissociate from their felt experience, as if it is a plight of human weakness to be subject to our feeling. But interacting with our emotions as waves is different: “emotions are like waves - we get to choose which ones to surf”. We can be overcome by their strength, barely coming up for air, we can be moved by the wave to our own Shores, we can experience the crest, the trough, the crash. We can allow the waves of our emotions to lap over our Being.
Our emotions hold power because they carry messages from our intuition so their power has been censored. Connecting with our emotions is connecting to our most original power. The power of emotions comes from their purpose - since they’re messengers, they come with a message. It is up to us in our sovereignty to express our emotions in ways that are aligned with our personal values. The fundamental purpose of emotions is both neutral and important.
Emotion & Purpose
Anger Protect from injustice
Sadness Grieve loss of love
Jealousy Repression of desire
Joy Following our values
Disgust Aversion avoidance from toxins
At the heart of all emotions is the basic human need for love, acceptance, belonging and meaning. Our denial of our humanity leads to the judgement of our emotions.
Quantum Mechanics questions our perceived reality. It is, perhaps, the act of witnessing that imbues animation, that gives life. In meditation, we are called upon to be the Witness to our experience, to Observe, to simply Notice, without judgement. This distance allows us to see more clearly, to not get caught up in the vines of minutiae.
As we name our emotional experiences, we create the Space we need to Observe with compassionate objectivity the Truth of our reality. So long as our emotions swell within us without expression, we will be overshadowed by their power. As we learn to bridge our inner world into the outer world in alignment with our values, our Truth is rewarded by the universe, who loves when we can trust in the unknown mystery of our authenticity.
Quantum Theory asks us to sit with Mystery, to bask in the Unknown, without certainty. Certainty is a trap that inevitably shrinks our Life into what we can Imagine.