Becoming Unbreakable

How much of your true emotional experience do you let yourself feel?

Can you let anger rip through you until you’re roaring? 

Can you let grief tear you apart until your whole body heaves with tears? 

Can you tremble in fear and feel your heart palpating? 

For a long time, I suppressed my difficult emotions, unknowingly diverting them to be expressed as physical pain. Unwinding that pain showed me that life is uncontrollable and pain is unavoidable, as much as I naively believed I could ‘do better’ somehow.

The reality is that the more I stay present in deeply uncomfortable emotional states, the more I can access states of joy, bliss, and gratitude. When we limit our experience of our ‘negative’ emotions, we narrow our emotional range.

So, how do we allow painful emotions in a culture that promotes fixing or distracting? How can we grow the container, our inner well, to allow a broader depth of emotional process?

When we trust in our wholeness and in our capacity to regulate ourselves from the worst rage or the heaviest sadness, it’s easier to allow ourselves to feel our pain.

On their own, emotions are like waves. If we allow them to rise up, without creating a story about them, they will subside naturally. But when we dwell on the stories that support our pain, we can prolong our emotional reactions indefinitely. 

What seems like emotional awareness, can become endless emoting, which weakens our entire system. I learned that lesson the hard way, by revisiting old trauma and crying the same tears over and over again. I believed that somehow the tears were finite and if I let myself cry enough, I could heal my grief.

Eventually, I learned to distinguish when the energy of my emotions are moving in a healthy way versus when I’m getting stuck in them. I’ve had a lot of support to develop the self-awareness needed to navigate this inner dance. 

How much emoting should we allow before we step in with our self-regulation tools?

I’m constantly playing with this edge for myself and my students and I’m turning sooner to the healthy self to bring in trust, wholeness, and love to soothe the triggered part. 

I no longer believe that healing and self-growth have to be utterly gut-wrenching. Yes, there is pain and difficult passages but there’s also as much universal support as we possibly need to go through the process.

This short story is about allowing anger in a healthy way so it can be felt and released.

Last summer I was at a lake and I came in contact with anger in my body. I stormed off alone in the woods, stomping and thrashing about. I smashed a big stick and had some good screams. As I picked up rocks and threw them (along with things I wanted to release) into the water, my daughter, who was paddling nearby in a canoe, gave me a questioning look. 

“I’m releasing anger. I’m stomping and throwing rocks into the lake.”

She nodded and simply said, “As you should.”

What’s considered normal is what we normalize.

When the going gets tough and I stay present, rather than distracting or anesthetizing myself, I strengthen. Every time I ride a hard wave and access the divine support I need to stand back up again, I’m stronger for it because my being and my heart have expanded.

This expansion brings an ease to my laughter, a lightness to my life, and an inner playfulness that delights me. When I return to joy from anger, fear, or sadness, I believe in myself more than I did before. I trust in the resilience of my heart and that makes me at least somewhat unbreakable.

Living so fully takes courage. You may need guidance and support.