I had a recent realization about positive and negative emotions. Long before I started doing any real emotional work, I could still feel happiness, excitement, joy, and peace. I often felt all of those emotions when I went out swing dancing. After the dance ended and I went home, the positive emotions gradually faded until I was left with the negativity that I hadn’t let go of yet. Looking back, I think I know why.
Brad Blanton, author of Radical Honesty, said the following in his TEDx Talk: “When you experience an experience, it comes and goes. And when you resist experiencing an experience, it persists.” I knew this to be the case for negative emotions but didn’t realize it also seems to apply to positive emotions as well. Even when I’m feeling a lot of negativity, I can still forget about that for a while if I go out for some dancing, juggling, or anything else that makes me feel alive and brings up a lot of positive emotions. By fully experiencing those emotions, they eventually fade. When there’s a lot of underlying negativity, that then comes back into focus and stays there until I fully experience it as well. I think that explains why I’d have that crash after feeling a lot of positive emotions.
This doesn’t mean that letting go of all emotions results in being left with nothing. In my experience, the best states I’ve felt have been ones of deep peace and contentment. That feels different to me than a highly charged emotion such as happiness or excitement. It feels deeper, more real, and lasts longer. These states can be difficult to enter due to the negative emotions I haven’t yet released. As I continue with my inner work, it becomes easier to get into those higher states and they also feel deeper and last longer. I think that this will accelerate the further along I go. For now, the work I’ve done makes it easier to come down gently from elevated emotions as there is rarely ever a big crash into negativity as there was before. I hope this was helpful for you and I look forward to seeing what happens as I keep working on this.