Emotional Explorations

From a very young age, one of my favourite things to do was to lie down on the grass and watch the clouds dance. It was also one of my favourite activities when I used to get high (along with eating chips and kissing). I especially love the way the clouds and the sun play together.

Fast forward to the present, these ever-changing formations mirror my emotions. Changing and shifting from moment to moment.

It's been almost a year since I began diving deeper into my emotional being. The first step was developing awareness which is ongoing. Now I'm learning to identify my emotions and learn the language of emotions, how to name them as they arise from the darkness. The only ones I'm well versed in are anger, shame, and guilt.

Bringing up suppressed emotions has not been easy, and my ability to write about it is limited. I can feel more but I lack the language now to speak about them with clarity, but I'll get there.

One of the challenges of opening the emotional doors is in the short term I am extra sensitive and easily triggered. The gates to the castle are down.  I'm learning to change my response in moments when I'm triggered. I don't know if I can remove triggers cultivated by emotional pain from my childhood, but I know I can train myself to process and respond from a place of love as opposed to reacting with anger.

It's no secret that men have not been given permission to express themselves emotionally, at least not the full spectrum of emotions. The message is that men aren't emotional, yet anger is accepted. It's not that we aren't emotional, it's that we were taught to suppress our emotions which are then stored in different areas of our body and mind depending on the emotion. This leads to a whole array of physical and mental complications and impacts the quality of our relationships and how the masculine shows up in the world.

My hope is that on the other side of this part of my journey, I will arrive at a place where I can love all beings unconditionally and live permanently with an open broken heart which is the inevitable side effect.

To be continued...