A Feeling Deferred
—breaks through the concrete of your denial
When we feel something unpleasant, our initial reaction is to move away from it. This makes sense, evolutionarily speaking. Touch a hot stove and you’ll instinctively pull away to keep your hand intact. (Intact hands are pretty useful.)
Emotions (and feelings) are different.
Experiencing an unpleasant emotion does not create the same lasting damage as burning your hand on a stove does, yet we often go to great lengths to avoid feeling painful emotions.
Look, no one said it’s pleasant to feel grief or rage or jealousy. But here’s the thing:
Emotions are transient feelings.
They (unlike a burning hot stove) move on. I mean, we’d all like to stay in a state of orgasmic ecstasy, but we know that feeling doesn’t last. The good news is that neither do the unpleasant feelings.
To truly deal with unsettling feelings we need to stay in them. Face them. Invite them to sit at the long wooden table in the cottage of our Self. Pour them a cup of tea and just be with them.
If we don’t manage difficult feelings, they will return until we do.
Just like the tiny sprout of a plant—miraculously!—makes its way through the concrete. Whatever layers of denial you have placed on top of the unpleasantness will be broken through because your emotions need to be felt. All of them.
Your feelings are yours. Invite them into the cottage. Be a good host.
