Your Emotions Are Portals

I used to overlook how my emotions could guide me in my healing journey. I looked at all the ones I didn’t want to feel as obstacles, blocking me from finding peace.

I’m not sure when the defining moment was, but something shifted in me. And I started viewing the emotions I thought were preventing me from happiness as opportunities to explore the unhealed parts of myself.

But I also didn’t jump in with open arms. I treaded, very delicately, and with a lot of apprehension. Anger, shame, humiliation, rage, guilt- there was so much of it, that I didn’t want to look.

When I finally confronted the things I was running away from, the way I looked at myself changed. I had compassion when I once hated who I was. And no, I’m not done looking.

But we can also get to a point when we stop dissecting every moment, every conversation, every situation, wondering how we could have done things differently. We can stop obsessing over if maybe we had in fact, done things differently, or reacted in a more “appropriate” way, that we would somehow be better people without the mistakes we’ve made.

There is no manual on being who we are, or life. But our emotions are the catalysts to our healing. And our intuition is our compass. So, we can follow them to what our definition of fulfillment is.

That doesn’t mean we won’t feel pain, we will. We just won’t make things more difficult on ourselves when we allow ourselves to be guided.

Our emotions are portals to our own inner peace and freedom. They’re the parts of ourselves that need to be validated and loved. And when we do acknowledge them, we don’t seek approval outside of ourselves anymore, hoping that maybe, one day, someone will see our worth. We see and feel it within, a contentment that sits with us, even when things aren’t going the way we hoped they would.

Our emotions are the way out of our own matrix so we can awaken to the greatest version of ourselves. But we have to be able to stand in the shadows before we can rise in the light.

Pay attention to your thoughts and feelings, especially the ones you push back down because you think you shouldn’t feel that way, or maybe you don’t want to look because you’re embarrassed at the way certain things unfolded. Those are the emotions that unlock the caged parts of yourself.

If it makes you feel better, we all have embarrassing moments. But, we also have more of them when we don’t take the time to nurture the unhealed parts of ourselves because it makes us act in ways we later wish we didn’t.

It isn’t the anger, resentment, bitterness, shame, humiliation, embarrassment, or rage that’s holding us hostage. It’s our resistance to feeling the emotions we don’t want to feel that keeps us trapped.

When you allow yourself to feel those emotions, layers of dead weight start to fall away. Things that you hold onto, things you have no idea how much they consume you or even how deeply they impact who you become- some of them fade into distant memories.

So feel it all- the pain, the hurt, the anger, the resentment, the bitterness, the sadness, the sorrow, the grief, the times you wish you had spoken up, the times you wish you didn’t speak up, the choices you wish you made differently.

Take the time to learn your triggers, your passions, and the things you silently wish for but don’t want to say out loud. Your freedom is within everything you don’t want to feel.

I’ll see you soon…in the meantime, love yourself so much that even a Hallmark Christmas movie would be jealous.