The art of emotion is very important to me, the journey of heart and voice. I am very passionate about doing my individual work and taking responsibility for my life and for sure I don’t always get it right! But engaging in this work touches me to the core, because it is about me showing up and growing into full maturity with my reactions to the world.
I know that the only thing I can heal is my own life, no-one else’s, so understanding the emotions of my heart and how it operates is very important. I know it is sometimes hard to ‘feel’ emotion and just be with it. Yet emotions are beautiful, liberating and creative, they are not to be hidden, whether we are men or women, emotions are ‘energy-in-motion’, a living breathing organism, they have their own particular dance, expression and artistry, they matter! When that energy is released it frees us from pain, from stagnation, from depression.
But too often when emotion does arrive, we make it about what another person has done to create this feeling in us. What I know is that my feeling is MY feeling….its about me. As soon as I make it about another person I become a victim, and that is very unattractive. If I want to ‘sit with my feelings’ it needs to be in the moment, pure, this is mine and its nothing to do with any one else, no blame – kind of thing.
The crazy thing is is that it’s so much ‘easier’ to make it about someone else, it diverts the pain and for that moment, we are released…and then it comes back, maybe the story changes slightly, but the pain still arrives, time and time again.
And then what can and often does come through is emotional manipulation, and that does not serve anyone, not the one who is feeling nor the ones listening, if we manipulate and become victims with it, we are not honoring ourselves and ultimately not growing up! We go round and round in a circle, or a triad of victim, perpetrator, rescuer and it never ends.
We might admit we are at fault, but can also be prone to insist that some one, some thing, some place is also at fault.
So taking the feeling and making it ‘my own’ and nothing to do with ‘the other’ is the way forward. And owning our own part in the scenario, at least being willing to look, means we are not helpless victims, we have choices and we can gain a level of serenity no matter what that situation. And when that e-motion moves…we experience freedom, no matter what the story is, because that story no longer exists, it becomes a poem, a work of art, a manuscript even a song.
Caroline Carey Writings, Prose & Poetry 