Aspiring Beam of Light

Sometimes when I talk to my kids about experiencing hard feelings, I tell them to imagine their mind is a house. The feelings will come up from the basement or through a crack in the wall. I tell them to imagine that they sit in their living room with whatever feeling it is and have a conversation. Ask questions like, “What do you need right now?” “What are you trying to tell me?”

In my experience when I’m feeling hard feelings (like fear, embarrassment, rejection, or loss), my initial reaction is to run from it. Turn around, and high tail the heck away, which can look like social withdrawal or even defensiveness. 

But when we do this, we don’t grow. We sit in our comfort and learn clever ways of evading the feelings we don’t want to feel, instead of facing them and learning from them.

When I let myself sit with hard feelings, the way they respond to my questions is usually with a desire to be seen. For me to sit with them in silence and stillness. The way to heal will always be through. If we try to ignore or push away, they will get stronger and more rigid, creating a hard external shell that is increasingly more difficult to crack. They will become more clever at hiding in places we don’t realize.

“What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.” -Carl Jung

These ‘logs’ in our eyes make it difficult to interact lovingly with the world around us. When I’m feeling rejected, unwanted, or unworthy my interactions with the world look closed off, cold, and judgmental. My thoughts sound like “Why would they do that?” “I would never do that to them.” “They probably think I’m annoying.” “I shouldn’t talk so much anymore.” My perspective of reality is filtered through this lens of fear. 

It doesn’t leave much space to love others- or myself, for that matter. 

What I am learning is that the essential goal isn’t the absence of these hard feelings- it is the ability to face our darkness and shine love into it. To sit in the dark room, grab on to the tails of hope and faith, who are attempting to claw us back into the light.

To learn to find peace in the midst of the storm. 

When we follow the threads of what our feelings are trying to teach us, we learn how to sit within ourselves and how to sit with others. We begin to allow the hard shells of these feelings to be cracked open through acceptance, and to look at others and ourselves with compassion.

When we learn to face our darkness, we grow in light.