I forgot to text my wife. I’ll do it when I hit a red light. Dread builds the closer I get to home. I had a decent day at work, but I can feel the anger rise. As I pull up to a light, I suppress my emotions and take out my phone. I text her a single number. The number two. It’s a warning. The two is a score out of ten, a measure of how bad of a mood I am in.
She had asked me to let her know how I’m feeling so she can mentally prepare for what’s walking through the door. Every time I drive home now, I send her a number. Usually it’s low. That’s true again tonight. It’s been like that for weeks. I love her, but I can’t seem to escape my hurt feelings when I am around her. I get dark and fearful thoughts. My work stress bleeds into my home life. My home life impacts my work. The closer I get to home, the more on edge I feel. I’m a mess. I’m at the mercy of my own emotions.
Before I understood them better, this was my relationship to my emotions. I used to ride an endless emotional rollercoaster. The ups and downs impacted my relationship, my work, and took over my life. My wife and I were on the verge of divorce. My coworkers started to notice the symptoms of stress.
Thankfully, I found an understanding that helps me relate to my emotions in a new way.
You can form a new relationship with your emotions too. Discover more understanding for how you feel.
Emotions are a movement of energy. Each emotion connects to a thought. The emotion says, “this is how it feels to have that thought.”
Thought and feeling arise together as two parts of the same expression. It’s like they are different sides of the same coin. The intellect talks in words and pictures. The deeper mind speaks with feeling.
I used to intellectualize my feelings. If I could figure them out, I reasoned, I would never be challenged by my emotions again. In therapy or journaling, it seemed like I could dive deep into my emotions, but I could never come to any resolution.
I learned a fact that freed me from this trap: my thinking mind is not capable of understanding emotion.
Like a vampire, it can’t see its own reflection. Because it’s on one side of the coin, it can’t look around to the other side. No matter how hard it tries, the intellect just won’t ever understand feeling.
Feelings aren’t meant to be understood. They are meant to be felt. When I realized I couldn’t understand my emotions by thinking about them, I stopped trying.
Tears run down my cheeks. I’m holding my daughter in my arms. We’re in bed for naptime. She’s asleep. I feel her weight. She’s not too big yet, and that’s why I’m crying. I know I won’t be able to do this forever. I have been emotional this week, so raw. Today, I’m crying tears of gratitude. I have a beautiful appreciation for my life.
This experience shows the natural workings of thought and feeling. I had a thought and then felt what that thought feels like.
My emotional experience could have been different. I could have been angry, upset, sad, or depressed. It just so happened that I was grateful. That was how thought showed up. The energy of emotions followed. My emotions aren’t trying to hurt me. They only want to show me what my mind is doing. They are a reflection of what I think.
Thought filters the energy of feeling.
Daylight hides a full spectrum of color. When light hits water vapor, a rainbow forms. For a time, that hidden spectrum becomes visible. The vibrant colors were always there within the clear light.
When we see a color, we only see that wavelength reflected back to us. An object that we see as red absorbs the rest of the rainbow and reflects back only red.
Emotions are like this. Like the light, they start as a full, neutral energy. Thought colors them, filtering them down. An angry thought will reflect only anger. A sad thought will reflect only sadness. Before thought strains it down, feeling begins as a full energy.
If I know the spectrum is there, I can feel the energy of emotion behind a specific feeling. I have the ability to experience the color of my current emotion and the rainbow behind it at the same time. I do this by feeling the energy of my emotions. This expands my ability to feel.
When you see what powers emotion, they become less overwhelming.
Although I know there is a bigger picture, I don’t always see it. I mistake the tip for the entire iceberg. I forget that a chapter is not the whole story. Yes, I still get caught up in what I am feeling and act out of it. This happens. Nothing is wrong with me. That is how the movement of emotion shows up at times. I’m human.
Emotions don’t stop when you understand them better.
You still experience your thinking even after you wise up to what it is doing. The only way to experience what a thought feels like is to feel it. You will still get what the mind calls “bad” emotions, but what if emotions couldn’t be bad?
Feeling has the seed of everything you need to know within it. Each one is wisdom in action. Sometimes, you misenterpret that wisdom. No feeling tells you that you are unworthy. No feeling tells you that you are broken. Only thoughts say that. Don’t listen to the thought. Listen to the feeling.
If you get lost in your emotional world, don’t be too hard on yourself. Look for a rainbow behind the color of what you currently feel. Thinking only reflects a piece of emotional energy. The rest is still there, hidden behind the filter. Remind yourself that your intellectual thoughts are unable to understand emotion. Let go of the need to figure them out in your head.
I forgot to text my wife. I’ll wait until I get to a red light. I attempt to be present as I drive, listening to the sounds and sights. Other than the hum of the wheels on the road, it’s quiet because I keep the radio off. I tune into how I’m feeling. I’m feeling neutral but not in a bad way. It’s a clear feeling that isn’t artificially high or weighted down by heavy thoughts. I come up the left turn that takes me home and stop at the light. “On My Way!” I text my wife. She’s at home with our twenty one month old daughter.
I no longer have to send my wife a score, and I haven’t for years. I still get into low moods, but I usually don’t get carried away by them. More and more, I don’t think myself into frustration, anger, and fear. I’m more open to the experience of what I am feeling. My emotions are my window into my soul.
I used to misinterpret my feelings. I thought they were telling me about my wife, life situation, and myself. Because I felt unloved, it meant my wife didn’t love me, and I was unlovable. Now I know my emotions are a reflection of my thoughts. I allow the energy of emotion to move through me while sensing the full spectrum of feeling.
I still lose myself in feelings. My understanding is limited. I’m ok with that. It’s not because I’m broken, but because I’m human.
The interplay of thought and feeling is a mystery meant to be experienced instead of solved.
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