How To More Deeply Experience Joy & Peace - Embracing Negative Emotions
Is bliss, when there is nothing to contrast it with, actually enjoyable for human beings? Or is it rather that the full range of human emotions is required for anyone of them to take on significance? From “All Things Shining” by Dreyfus & Kelly
The answer to that last part of the question is a resounding YES. We need all emotions in order for any of them to have meaning. You could compare this to a person who can only tastes sweet. There is no significance to the sweetness, no enjoyment, no pleasure. The pleasure only occurs when there is a contrast to bitter or sour. The same with our seasons or temperature. The lovely feeling of the warmth of the sun is experienced in greatest rapport only after a very chilly day or season.
The experience here is not to just “get” this is true for us as humans but to KNOW it….to take it deeply within ourselves and integrate it within our belief systems and daily living. Truly knowing and integrating this concept within ourselves builds our experiences and shapes our perspective of the world.
When we integrate the belief that we need all emotions in order to sense any significance in any of the emotions most of us want to experience in greater amounts like joy, peace, happiness, purpose, meaning, pleasure, enjoyment we can live in a way where we do not fear any emotion, including the ones we typically do fear and try to avoid at all costs like grief, sadness, disappointment, anxiousness, etc.
When we don’t fear experiencing any emotion, we can truly experience peace. We can stop the struggle of trying to get away from fear or disappointment or sadness or putting in all the energy to push them away, repressing them only to have them reemerge in ways that harm us even more. “What we resist, persists.” Sometimes this manifests even in physical illness but often as mental and emotional issues as well as broken relationships. To stop negative emotions from compounding themselves into these negative issues, the remedy is to stop struggling against them, and instead embrace them as needed in order to experience those emotions we so desire in this journey like enjoyment, peace, happiness, etc.
Embracing the significance of negative emotions does not mean we don’t feel those negative emotions anymore….that experience never ceases. But it does create for us a way to find peace even while experiencing those negative emotions. I think of life as 50-50. 50% of the time there will be an experience of negative emotions. 50% of the time we will experience positive emotions. We need both in order to experience any meaning, any purpose, any significance …which most of us as humans are looking for whether this is conscious or unconscious.