feeling everything

Here is what I’m learning: feelings are the heart of everything.

Growing up with a mentally ill mother, there were some Big Feelings in our house. They were embarrassing, overwhelming, sometimes even life threatening. Growing up with a mentally ill mother also meant there wasn’t room for my feelings. I felt scared, angry, frustrated that what was happening wasn’t fair. I remember laying on the green carpet of my bedroom floor being overcome by feelings with no one there to help me hold them.

I decided then that I would only feel as much as I could handle.

I told grief it could take it’s time & after not even two months tried to shoo it out like a houseguest that has overstayed it’s welcome. I’m ready to get back to work, get back to life, get back to me, but I can’t fully wake up. I touched into the feeling underneath the unexplainable exhaustion and there was a little girl curled up, deeply, unspeakably sad.

I felt all the grief I was willing to feel. I felt as much as the little girl alone in that bedroom thought she could handle.

The degree to which I shy away from the hard feelings, the loss of what I never had, the loneliness, the impossible anger at the world simply being the way it is is the same degree to which I shy away from joy, pleasure, and contentment. The safety stop I built in doesn’t measure by polarity, only degree. I feel as much as I think I can handle, then shut it down.

To me, being a spiritual person doesn’t mean that I’m always happy or positive. It’s that I welcome everything that life is, the high and the low, the hard and the easy. To be a spiritual person means to hold two contradictory truths. It’s to have your heart break, truly ache, for all the ways life is intensely unfair and to sit peacefully, held in the divine truth that what is is perfection.

I can’t rush my feelings, but I can welcome them, speak to them, make room for them. I can say yes to crying when my tears well up, yes to the hopeful giddiness of a crush, yes to the pleasure of watching the wind waft in the translucent curtains on my porch one warm winter evening. The more I say yes to feeling everything, everything, the more happiness seeps in & takes hold.