There are no 'bad' emotions...

I was listening to the self-help celebrity on stage speaking about her beliefs regarding ‘bad’ emotions – she was using shame as the particular emotion of choice – and it got me wondering about the labels we give emotions.

Obviously, some emotions are more challenging to experience than others. Shame, embarrassment, anger, sadness – these feelings are all difficult to deal with. No person is going to be ‘happy’ to be feeling shame.

The celebrity’s perspective hovered very closely to being a dismissal of ‘bad’ emotions, with an implication that they were just constructs of a person’s mind. That they were imaginary. This was illustrated when she asked the interviewer to pass her the glass of water from the table between them. Then she asked the interviewer to pass her shame… the crowd nodded and applauded their understanding of her point and she repeated her belief that emotions are not physical, are not real, just in the imagination.

It was a good point she raised; that our emotions are our own and nobody else’s. We cannot give anyone our shame.  

But that’s where I began to depart from being in agreement. We might not be able to give anyone a physicality of our shame, but we can give them the energy of it. Think about it the other way around – is it true that we cannot give anyone our love?

It is a small subtlety perhaps, but I don’t believe that emotions are “just imagination” or “perception”.

Changing your thinking or perspective can make you feel better (or worse) about a situation, but that doesn’t make the emotion “just in the mind” That’s not my understanding of my emotions. When I am within the squall of any emotion it always feels real to me, they do not remain enclosed in my ‘mind’.

I believe my emotions are a message, a signal that there is something to know about them. More than this - that I have a choice as to how I interpret and react to the message. These choices have implications in the ‘real’ world as well as the spiritual world.

I put the characters in my writing through some extremely intense emotional moments. This is what I like to think about, I like to study the choices we all have in moments such as these, that is what fascinates me and I want to explore them.

In my stories, the manner in which the characters deal with their emotions does affect their physicality. The emotion can be turned into energetic prisons or flights of freedom and growth - all depending upon the character’s thinking and choice of response. I believe this is the reality of our emotions and why we are wise if we listen and learn from the full range of feelings we have. All are given to us as opportunities for spiritual growth and work.

In the second book of the Beyond Veils series, 'The Truth of Her' to be published in Summer 2019, Lyra, the main character, is faced with a stark emotional dilemma caused by a traumatic event. Does she become what is done to her, choosing to remain within anger and reductive revenge, or does she choose another way? The story explores what these choices look like and their consequences - why is one choice generally held to be ‘good’ and another ‘bad’?

So, although I enjoyed the self-help celebrity’s perspective, I don’t subscribe to the view that there are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ emotions. I work on welcoming them all, and allowing them to be present and speak their messages to me. I’m not saying I get it right and believe me when I say that I have to work extremely hard at being aware of the energy when it is in motion. I expect it to be a lifelong toil! This work is one reason why the stories I write feature difficult life-themes and questions.

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