Holy, Sacred Emotions

Do you love your emotional self? I mean REALLY love your discomfort? Uncertainty? Confusion? Anger? Sadness?

This week’s YouTube video Talk and Practice goes into depth on our emotional range and how it serves us. Yes. Emotions exist to provide us with valuable insight and feedback IF we are vigilant enough to be curious about them, explore them, and embrace them. While recording this week’s YouTube video I had an epiphany or Divine download that I am still processing. Lately, I’ve been revisiting Father Richard Rohr’s work. It’s part of my practice of following my curiosity. I watched a video interview he did with Oprah where he said when he does retreats with men he introduces on day five the truth that sadness underlies anger. He tees it up and when the impact hit his male retreat participants they cry. They cry hard. Really hard. And once they’ve expressed the sadness beneath the anger they have relief and freedom.

While talking about this on the YouTube program I had an epiphany. Holy Cow!! The opposite is true for women. We carry sadness (which is socially acceptable for us) and underneath is anger. Once we penetrate the soil of sadness we hit our vein of anger. Holy, holy, holy cow. We carry each other’s darkness.

Now, that awareness held within it a sacred moment for me. It is becoming more clear to me every day how much we need each other to “walk each other home”, as Ram Dass would say. This is one of the verifications of this Truth for me in the field of emotions. I got goosebumps.

As Spiritual Energetic beings, you and I have an emotional system established to provide us with feedback. Each emotion is letting us know that we have a perception at work we can tease out and change if it doesn’t serve us. It also shows us themes. For example, when I am angry it means a boundary of mine has been violated or I perceive an injustice. This is a map of sorts and helps me to navigate my experience of being a human. However, unintegrated and undeveloped emotional fragments when embraced and integrated set us free to be a larger container of Light for humanity. Now, if that not your life purpose–it can at least set you free. Either and both ways, our individual self and humanity win.

I began my curiosity with emotions with the release of Jack Kornfield’s book A Path with Heart, which I still recommend to clients. In it he has a spiritual practice called Taking the Seat. This practice encourages us to interview our emotions. I took this practice upon myself over a twelve year period. Every day I would Take the Seat and get to know how my emotions serve me. It has allowed me to be a more open person and available spiritual advisor.

You are invited, beginning today, to stop fighting the feeling your emotions and instead allow them to be felt and passed through your body. You are SO much more than your emotional self, and yet if you are stuck emotionally it is difficult to reach that MORE within.

Open to Wonder,

Reverend Bonnie