What you have to know is that suffering is just the refusal to accept
what is. That’s it. Etymologically, it
comes from the Latin word to
“from below to bear.” Or, to “resist, endure, put under.”
So healing is really just letting yourself feel.
It is unearthing your traumas and embarrassments and losses and
allowing yourself the emotions that you could not have in the
moment that you were having those experiences. It’s letting yourself
filter and process what you had to suppress at the time to keep
going, maybe even to survive.
We all fear that our feelings are too big, especially in the moment
we’re actually having them. We were taught not be too loving, we’d
get hurt; too smart, we’d get bullied; too fearful, we’d be vulnerable.
To be compliant with what other people wanted us to feel. As kids we
were punished for crying out if our emotional experience wasn’t in
accordance with our parents' convenience. (No wonder we still
respond the way we do.)
The point is that you aren’t the one who is afraid of feeling too
much. It’s the people who called you crazy and dramatic and wrong.
The people who don’t know how to handle it, who want you to stay
where you are. Those are the people who want you to keep not
feeling. Not you. You know how I know?
Because your numbness isn’t
feeling nothing, it’s feeling
everything, and never having learned to process anything at all.
Numbness is not nothing, neutral is nothing. Numbness is everything
at once.
Because your sadness is saying, “I am still attached to something
being different.” Your guilt is saying, “I fear I have done bad in
someone’s eyes,” and your shame, “I fear I am bad in someone’s
eyes.”
Your anxiety is your resistance to the process, your last grasps at a
control you are becoming more and
more aware that you do not
have. Your tiredness is your resistance to who you really are, the
person you actually want to be. Your annoyance is your repressed
anger. Your depression, biological factors aside of course, is
everything coming to the surface, and you bellowing down to stow it
away.
And your arrival at the conclusion that you cannot go on like this,
that you’re
missing out, that you’re off-track and feeling stuck and
lost, is you realizing that you need not change your feelings. You just
have to learn to lean into them and see what they are trying to tell
you.
Trying to change how you feel is like finding a road sign that points
in the opposite direction of where you had intended to go and getting
out to try to turn the sign, rather than your course of action.
And what happens when we stow away the emotions that
accompany our experiences, never give ourselves time to process,
try to force ourselves into feeling any given way at any given time, is
we disregard what will give us the ultimate peace:
just allowing,
without judgment.
So it’s not about changing how you feel. It’s about listening. Not
accepting what they appear to mean—that’s important—but really
following your instincts down to what they are trying to signal. They
are how you communicate with yourself.
Every feeling is worthwhile. You miss so much by trying to change
every one of them away, or thinking there are some that are right or
wrong or good or bad or that you should have or shouldn’t, all
because you’re afraid that you’ll tell yourself something you don’t
want to hear.
The feelings you most suppress are the most important ways you
guide yourself. Your apprehension to listen is not your own desire.
It’s fear of being something more or less or greater or worse or
simply different than those around you have implied they will accept.
When you choose to value having other people’s acceptance over
your own, you accept a fate of battling your instincts to assimilate to
the needs of other people’s egos. In the meantime, a world and
lifetime
of listening, leaning, allowing, following, perceiving, feeling,
and experiencing…constantly eludes you.
Sadness will not kill you. Depression won’t, either. But fighting it
will. Ignoring it will. Trying to escape it rather than confront it will.
Denying it will. Suffocating it will. Allowing it no place to go other than
your deep subconscious to embed and control you will. Not that
you’ll take your life or destroy everything “good”
you do receive
(though you might).
