Let Emotions Be Your Guides
Generation Z may be the first generation to experience emotions in a healthy way. The diverse tidal wave of self-help and spiritual development movements that were birthed by Generation X and continued to prosper under the Millennials have at least one common theme: Feel your emotions, so that you can let them go, and they don’t affect your life in negative ways.
Most of our parents, even if they were well-meaning, either overtly or subconsciously taught us to stuff our feelings. If you didn’t, a woman would be judged by society as hysterical and a man would be feminine and undignified. Those are big boots on our necks. Are these leftover pseudo-stoic philosophies generated by the chaos of World War II? Is life neatly summed up in one powerful notion–”Keep Calm and Carry On?”
Who knows, and it doesn’t really matter. Later generations were faced with a choice: Teach our children to stuff their feelings, or experience them in a healthy way. But is it enough to feel your emotions and let them go? And how do you let them go?
Maybe you can’t just “Let your feelings go.” But you can divert their energy toward a positive effect in your life. You can let your emotions be your guides.
When we pay attention to how something makes us feel, and let the emotions arise in us, we have the opportunity to use that energy in constructive ways. We may have hurt someone, and it makes us feel guilty or sad. If we pay attention to those feelings, we have the chance to not hurt others in the same way. It really is an intrinsic way to build values into our lives.
Our parents may or may not have taught us a set of values to follow in life. Maybe that’s a good start, but most of the deeply held values in our lives have been learned the hard way. We make mistakes, we hurt people, we hurt ourselves. Without the skill of feeling our emotions and letting them be our guides to different behavior in the future, we can get caught in destructive cycles of the same behavior. Often this leads to dramatic attempts to escape from these feelings that are unhealthy or even life-threatening.
If we pay attention to how we feel, we can decide to do things differently. It’s not because Mommy and Daddy said so–it’s not because our religion instructs us to behave in a certain way. It’s because we want to feel good about ourselves. We don’t want to be burdened by guilt and shame.
When we let emotions be our guides, we give ourselves agency. We don’t keep doing the same things, expecting different results. By using the energy of our emotions in this constructive way, they don’t get suppressed and show up as illness in our bodies. They forge a path to follow in life that makes us feel good about ourselves and who we are in the world.
Until next time
Scott and Lennart