InnerBliss: Owning All of Your Emotions

On a recent drive.

Listening to: This is for all of us for tomorrow.

Bliss: The yin and the yang. The black and the white and the gray. The night and the day. The sleep and the awake. The good and the bad and the ugly and the awe inspiring and the beautiful and the marred and the perfect and the disfigured and the quiet and the loud and the joy and the pain and the laughter and the tears and...

I hesitated to post that video; I think that sometimes it is all too easy to simplify things in terms of right and wrong, war and peace, us and them. There are and have been, I think, very few humans on this planet who truly thought they were doing wrong for wrong's sake, who set out to hurt others on purpose, or who did not think they were doing what was necessary.

This will sound funny, but we have to take messages of peace with a grain of salt -- understand that peace is complicated and never easy. "Salt" brings to mind Gandhi, who said that you can only choose nonviolence when you have come to completely feel and know the violence in your own heart. I fear too many people want to skip the learning and the knowing and just claim something they have not worked for and earned.

To understand the implications of this on a global scale, let's just take some time and think about it at the personal level.

As you may know from reading this blog, I was raised in a loud and angry and violent household. For a long time, I, too, was loud and angry and violent, and then I was lucky enough to meet someone who loved me for me and that changed everything -- as unconditional love is known to do.

But there was still much work to be done. I had to work through why I was angry and then feel the sadness that lay waiting underneath. Because, really, most anger is sadness in disguise. Anger is energizing so it's easier to have around for a lot of people, including me.

After some years, I came to know that I also contained peace and calm. But then I got to the point where I decided that peace and calm were exclusive. If peaceful and calm were what I was, then I could no longer be angry.

I also had gotten to the point where I identified any kind of passionate emotion with the violence of my parents. I set about, to put it plainly, repressing all that I identified as ugly.

The problem is that we are not just one or the other. We are not just comprised of beauty but also of ugly. We are not angels and saints; we are humans, with animal urges and drives and instincts.

All that repressed passion started to rot, which is what it does. It turned into self-hate and anxiety -- things that could destroy me from the inside. It also meant that the "good" passions were being repressed, because repression is not selective. If you are repressing the anger, you are repressing the creative too. All that juice comes from the same place; it just takes on different flavors.

So now I am to my latest life lesson: all of my emotions are valid. (Of course, what I do with them is another story.) I am allowed to be happy and sad; I am allowed to want peace but also be angry; I am allowed to think someone is wrong while also trying to understand them; I am allowed to be loudly excitable and frustrated and exhilarated all at the same time. I am allowed to contain both BlissChick and PissedChick. It makes me whole. It stops me from being some robot who makes decisions based on data rather than reality -- which is mostly messy.

Taken to an extreme, a repressed world becomes a world of rules, a world where one group of people is in the right and another in the wrong, a world where certain words are deemed "good" while others are "bad."

I would rather live in a world where the word "war" was not immediately deemed inappropriate for a peace loving person to utter. I would rather live in a world where being a vegetarian was not an automatic criteria for being a nonviolent person. I would rather live in a world that was understood as too gray for such nonsense.

A fundamentalist is a fundamentalist.

And during this time of electing a new President, all of our varities of fundamentalisms begin to peek out like slips hanging too low, because, suddenly, during a time like this, all that repressed anger and hate and righteousness seems to feel obligated to show itself full blown. We have every excuse in the world, we think, to share our pain in public, to be emotional exhibitionists.

Whereas, if we owned all our emotions to begin with, displays like this would not be necessary. That is the paradox of repressed emotion: it sets you up to act irrationally, the very thing you thought you were avoiding.

We must be more tolerant, more open, more emotionally honest, or we are destined to become the thing we have been claiming to despise.