“fear is bad and love is good!” – why taking
our feeling out of the boxes could improve our understanding of life.
Go to a
forest. Pick up a random piece of wood and look at it carefully. You will
observe a unique texture, shaped by nature which is the result of a complex
process in growing and adapting to a specific environment. This individual
piece of wood does not exist a second time. Once you zoom out your micro
perspective, you will be able to see an entire forest, composed by millions of
individual pieces of woods and plants. This observation always taught me to
understand how complex the world we live in actually is and how much energy it
requires us to understand and listen to our environment.
In order to
organize all the information in our brains, humans developed a strategy to
simplify everything around us. We put our perception in categories. Therefore:
a tree remains a tree, but seldom a tree which grows towards the sun, hiding
smaller trees in his shadow or hosting a bird.
Putting
things into categories helps us to simplify our lives, but it also makes us
loose our focus and our awareness to allow individualism. A tree is a tree, but
many of us would not take their time to carefully identify the uniqueness of a
certain tree. Nowadays this is what we call ‘mindfulness’.
Beside
nature there is something else most people would describe as “fuzzy” or
sometimes hard to understand: feelings and emotions. All of us sometimes
struggle with the outcomes of our inner processes and therefore book shops are
packed with books teaching us on certain emotions and people go therapists in
order to approach the unknown inside of their souls. The complexity of our
emotions brings us to the point also to sort our feelings into categories. We
usually use two different ones: good feelings and bad feelings.
I learned
about good and bad feelings in my early childhood. Education consisted concept
of “you should not be angry” or “always be happy, otherwise no one will like
you”. This kind of education is also gender based – men are supposed to hide
sadness while girls should not deal with aggression. Our way of conceptualizing
emotion provides the foundation for generations of humans who are taught to
ignore one of their key instincts: basic emotion, such as sadness, anger or
aggression.
I observed the dissolving of the “bad
feelings” becoming a trending movement in the past years.
People attend classes
in order to leave anger or sadness behind and there is a huge industry growing in
order to promote infinite happiness and the distance from anger and grief. Many
times I am confronted with people who try to tell me: “Look, I joined this
course and then I lost all my aggression and my hate. And yes, I do love
everybody.” Listening to these kinds of thoughts, I have the impression of
talking to a robotic version of a human prototype, but not to a real person.
But imagine
a world, in which no one would have any impact on someone else. You might be
telling your best friend how someone fooled you and she would respond with a
friendly smile. Are these the moments which create boundaries? Instead, I
remember evenings after break-ups and failures, in which we sat together,
drinking wine and gossiped endlessly about every boyfriend we ever had and will
have. I remember situations in which I allowed my emotions of jealousy,
aggression or sadness to take part of my actions – and my surrounding responded
with compassion and openness towards my weaknesses. It is an amazing experience
to be loved for your ‘bad parts’. If I would live in a world in which I could
never have an impact on anyone with my feelings – I would feel useless.
Feelings and emotion is a tool to communicate the insights of our heart, which
is more honest than expressing our ratio.
We also
have the tendency to work against feelings we judge as “bad”. These could be
aggression or anger. I met people who take this challenge very serious which
leads them to a point to ignore all the bad feelings someone ever experienced. I
have one friend who truly says that he never practiced failure. According to
him, his life was filled with happiness, loving parents, friends, health and a
good education. All of this sounds lovely and should be everyone’s dream.
Nevertheless – if I ask this person if he is happy about his life, he always
mentions that there is something missing. This helped me to understand, that
the ‘bad’ is a caring pathway towards reflection and learning.
I love to
compare the feeling of my friend to the illusion of a life-long holiday.
Imagine your life would only consist of free days, in which you always decide
what to do. Sounds like a dream? Yes, but most of us would conclude, that we typically
enjoy our free time, if we have worked before. That shows us – we need the bad
in order to understand about the good and vice versa. Sometimes love needs to
be taken away to show us how important it is. Sometimes we need to fail in
order to change our perspective. Everything we judge as “bad feelings” can
actually have a very positive impact on us. Our saddest moment allows us to
learn about vulnerability. Moments of anger can guide us towards our wishes.
However we
need to distinguish between actually having the feeling and about how much we
allow them to take over our decisions. Dealing with controversial emotions in a
compassionate way doesn’t mean that we are open and allowed to express them.
Our fear of communicating ‘bad’ emotions also results from our bad experiences
we have observing others expressing them in an inappropriate way.
Most of us witnessed
someone getting very aggressive and expressing himself by shouting or using any
kind of violence. And these examples are always mentioned to teach us to delete
aggression from our list of emotions. Still, most of the people who express aggression
belong to those with the biggest troubles of accepting it. Aggression is a tool
for many people to hide the current feeling of sadness or loneliness and
therefore is not used correctly. Compared to that, someone who really feels angry
and still is able to communicate his perception straight but not hurting,
allows his environment to understand and correlate to him.
In the end
we all belong to the same species, able to express anger and love, grief and
harmony. All of these are part of us and tools to orientate ourselves in this
world. What would help us is to open up towards our so called bad sides and
treat them with compassion and kindness. Maybe this is the pathway towards real
happiness.
