E-motion: How to handle strong emotions?

My mother saw me cry, it really took her by surprise. Growing up I never let myself show feelings. The wild emotional life was happening, but I would only allow myself to be expressive on the pages of my journal. And thank god for that, if I hadn’t journaled I think I’d have gone crazy because of all that was going on and that I was incapable of expressing.

And recently my mother saw me cry. She said: “Don’t cry, poor girl, you are so fragile”…

We generally try to live our lives without being emotional. There’s an unspoken rule in society that emotions are not cool.

If we are emotional as kids or in our teenage years, very soon we get told that we need to learn to control these emotions.

The result is yes, we can learn to feel cool. We also learn to numb ourselves down. Basically, we learn to suppress.

But not only do we suppress the so-called negative feelings, but also the ability to give and receive love, to feel joy and compassion.

On top of that – all these suppressed feelings become suppressed energy, and at some point it may manifest as a disease. As it actually happened in my case.

So I literally had to take homeopathic pills to get angry.

That was really challenging actually. As a 24 year old I had never really faced my anger. And it all was coming up, all the years of suppressed emotion. And I had no idea how to handle it. It was bubbling inside and cooking me. And I kept asking: “How do I handle it? What do I do about it?..”

Lots of things have changed since then, and now in my courses I actually often end up holding space for people who are challenged by their own emotions.

And here’s what I told my mother:

“My tears should never bother you, my tears are the biggest proof that I’m alive. I know this for sure because I’ve seen myself not only in the blissful vastness, but also in the deep dark. And I have yelled and cried and made animal noise, I’ve allowed the wounded animal inside me, I’ve seen the hysterical bitch, I’ve seen the shit-scared little child, I have visited my darkest anger, I’ve seen places within me from where I could kill…

And I have emerged a thousand times from all of it and I can tell you that I’m incredibly strong.

Stronger than your mind can ever imagine.

Stronger than what you think a human being can be.

I am strong enough to be one with the wild nature of emotion.

I am strong enough to feel.

I am strong enough to live.

And the only reason why you cannot see it is because you haven’t yet seen your own incredible strength and power…”

In the realms of the Mystical feminine practice,

we choose to stop the suppression of emotion. We question how to embrace emotions as a completely natural human expression, how to be with them, how to be authentic and at the same time not spill their energetic charge on people around us.

Intense emotions may very well resemble a storm.

We practice staying centered in the midst of the storm.

We bring shiva – consciousness into shakti – power.

We marry the masculine and the feminine within.

And if we ever doubt that we can handle a storm… There’s a simple thing we can do: stop trying to handle it.

We can simply stay with it.

Each of us is strong enough not to do anything about it.

And each of us at some stage has to realize how strong we really are.

If you’ve never cried till your eyes turned red and you felt like you were going to drown in your own tears and snot, please do so. And then cry some more. For no apparent reason.

And you will survive.

And you will feel at least a little more alive.

And you might consider doing it again.

Just because it feels so freakin’ good to be alive.

Art by Loui Jover