What do you do with your emotions?

 

I asked a friend this the other day and she told me that was the strangest question she had ever been asked.

But is it really that strange?

My friend joked that she gathers them and makes a necklace out of them, but I loved that answer. Yes, a bead for every time I allow myself to feel an emotion, to experience it and let it flow,  forming a precious bead on its way out.

Emotion Beads!

I’d wear them with pride!

 

 

Today I observed several emotions rise up in my body. There was sadness, confusion, anger, contentment and joy. I noticed them all and smiled at them.

Sadness, when we talked to my husband’s aunt and realized that she has dementia. She remembers the old days but forgets what she said a minute ago.

Confusion, when seven beautiful eggplants disappeared from my garden with no trace, no damage to the plants, no half gnawed pieces scattered around. Gone! Darn eggplant thieves!

 

 

Contentment, when we went out and worked in the yard quietly for an hour.

Joy, when I sat on the deck in the sun, reading a book and watching the birds, squirrels and butterflies.

Anger, I’ll elaborate on the anger.

This morning, I made a quick trip to Whole Foods to buy halibut for a special dinner my husband and I would enjoy. It was expensive! $26 a pound, but I still wanted to splurge on it. It looked slightly darker than usual, so I asked Mike, one of the regular fish guys there, if it was fresh. Whole Foods has a three day policy; whatever you buy is supposed to be good for three days after the purchase date. Mike went into a speech about how fish vary in color, depending on what they eat and how we can’t control what they eat when they’re in the wild, and of course it was fresh, he had just put it out today, and on and on, until he was finished double wrapping it.

Later, when I opened the package to start preparing it, I almost fainted from the smell. That fish was not fresh. It was far gone. Rotten. Decaying. That fish was hopeless. Almost decomposed.

 

 

 

I told my husband I wouldn’t cook it because we would get sick eating it. He said, we probably wouldn’t get sick but it wouldn’t taste good. So the fish went into the trash.

Oh well, I thought, the eggplants I was going to roast to accompany the halibut had disappeared anyway, so I might as well figure out something else for dinner. As I got busy making a spaghetti sauce and washing spinach for a salad, something stopped me in my tracks. Wait a minute! It screamed.

Now that I’m learning to be aware of my emotions, I sat down and paid attention to it. Where in my body was this feeling coming from? There was pressure in my chest and my jaw was clenched. Aha! I investigated further and sure enough I was angry but instead of processing it, I was making jokes about the fish being deader than dead and disappearing eggplants!  This has been a known pattern for me, get busy, joke and ignore emotions. This was not the first time I had brought home rotten food from Whole Foods!  Last month, the baby cucumbers looked firm and fresh from outside, but underneath the plastic cover, their bottoms had disintegrated. The packaged organic chicken a few months ago smelled even worse than today’s fish. The expensive, organic cashews were moldy. And now this.

So what did I do with my anger? I felt it. I let it fill my entire body and breathed space around it. I imagined it changing shape and color. I took it out to the garden and walked around with it, talking with it until it gave me clear messages and gradually flowed out.

Karla McLaren writes in her book, The Language of Emotions:

The questions for anger are: “what must be protected?” and “what must be restored?”

My time and money must be protected. My trust in the store where I buy my food must be restored. My boundaries of fairness and not being lied to must be restored. Once I worked through this, I was calm,  determined and knew what I wanted to do. I picked up the phone, not in anger anymore, but in kind action. Kindness towards myself and kindness towards the store.

Manager Scott was very apologetic for our dinner being spoiled. He took my name and left a refund and a gift certificate at the service desk for me to pick up on my next visit. He promised me he would talk to the meat department management about the issue. I was able to respect him, trust him and be kind. (He also pronounced my name correctly. I notice these things.)

All was well again. Substitute dinner was delicious, prepared with love and creativity, not angry energy, and my boundaries were restored.

This of course is a very simple example for anger. There are much heavier reasons for this emotion. But they all can be treated the same way, with respect, not by suppressing them or expressing violently, but finding out what their benevolent message is.

So I ask you, dear reader, what do you do with your emotions?

 

~ Do you suppress them?  Shove them under a rug? Grind your teeth and ignore them?

~ Do you express them inappropriately? Creating more conflict and stress?

~ Or do you feel them and process them? Do you listen to your inner wisdom’s input? Maybe make a emotion bead necklace?

 

 

If you don’t know how, I can help.