Embracing your emotions

I had an interesting conversation with a bright Pagan girl yesterday. To be honest I knew very little (and still know very little) about her path, but I kept an open mind and learned something awesome. We were sort of comparing notes and the following quote really stuck out: “We need to embrace every color on the spectrum to be whole, not try to live in black and white, and even shades of gray limit us.” We were talking about the different religious labels and how one word causes someone to generate an assumption that one path is “bad”, and another is “good”. It must sound obvious to some, but to me that sentence last night was kind of mind blowing. As an artist the idea of embracing all RGB color values is very enticing. I’m particularly fond of 255,0, 124 but that’s another matter entirely.

So let’s make the assumption that each color represents some kind of emotion, idea, or personality trait. There are countless words in various languages detailing emotions and some of them can get lost in translation. For example тоска (IPA: taska) in Russian can be used to convey an indescribable feeling of despair without any rational reason to feel that way. So with that in mind, we’ve now got countless colors to choose from including love, hate, joy, тоскa, and even envy. All of these feelings are required for balance but where do we draw the line? Do we accept the feelings denoting only positivity and light, or do we accept that we will feel some of the “darker” parts of human emotion? Personally, I’m definitely going to agree with my new friend and say we need to embrace every color on the spectrum.

That brings me, finally, to the point of this article. Should we act on all of our emotions? No. It’s fine to embrace them, but what happens if you don’t have some sort of mental or emotional filter to stop yourself from making an ass out of yourself? You won’t grow as a person, spiritually or emotionally. You won’t enjoy life as much. You’ll make hurtful comments to others and sour their mood if they’re not able to rise above it. All in all you really do get back what you put out into the world. Energy doesn’t just dissipate, it’s constantly in motion. If you want to be successful I highly recommend surrounding yourself with successful people. You can take some of their energy and in turn once you’re tuned in to the right frequency they can be influenced by yours. Alternatively, if you never can tune in to the right frequency someone might push you away and ask you to stop leeching off of them.

What I guess I’m really trying to say is that it bothers me a lot when people who should know better choose not to use that little filter. If you’re constantly spitting hatred and negativity left and right you’re not doing yourself (or the world) any favors. Some people can get by on talent, creativity, and a great work ethic, but some have to resort to trying to belittle others out of spite, jealousy, and childishness.

It’s a little late for a new year resolution, but mine was to eliminate the people out of sync with my frequency, accept and overcome my negative emotions in order to meet my goals, and just set goals in the first place. So far 2 of 3 of my goals have been reached this year. The third will take more time, but it all started with surrounding myself with people who could use common sense when interacting with others. I’m all the better for it. I accept that some days I’ll feel angry, hurt, тоска , or jealous, but I don’t try to take it out on others. I save it for my private diary with the (approximately) 255,0,124 colored pen.

Thanks for reading!

-Laith

Food for thought:
What interesting things have you learned from other faiths recently?
With what sort of people do you surround yourself?
What does balance mean in your life?