Feel, Heal, and Express

How do we heal what the world doesn’t want to look at?

As a society, especially in the US, we are conditioned to believe that our emotions rule or dictate our experience. We believe there are good emotions and bad emotions. We are taught that there are things that are acceptable, and things we must hide and pretend don’t exist.

We say things like “focus on the happy” and “all you need is love”, but we also believe “pleasure is shameful”.  “It’s OK to not be OK”, but “don’t be sad”. Because of this, being OK has somehow become taboo. “Depression only happens when you aren’t looking at the positives” and while “you should never show anger to someone”, we have destruction rooms where you can pay to go into a room full of stuff with a bat and spend 20 minutes throwing the anger that you aren’t ever supposed to feel around. Surpressing it, we turn that anger into hatred for the opposition - whoever the opposition is to you. To top it all off, we shove all of those emotions we pretend we don’t have into our heart space, so we can slowly kill ourselves with them.

Shoving those emotions in our heart space crowds the system that connects our internal systems together, and also hinders the link of all the connections in our lives.  It is an impossible conflict of understanding we have created in the name of not facing the hard things, which in turn gives us a pass on honoring ourselves. This leads us nowhere.  On purpose, as if that is the goal.

Many of us know this. Even those who don’t have this particular understanding or perspective know that something isn’t right. Heart disease is the number one killer in the world, antidepressants and mood stabilizers are taken by one in three people across the country, and are abused by many on an epidemic scale. More than half of our country has a therapist of one kind or another, even if it is just an under-qualified friend trying to help. It is so bad that when we achieved actual artificial intelligence, therapy became one of the first thing we used it for, asking a computer to validate our feelings.

It is a never-ending cycle of self abuse and desperation to "always be happy”. We look at people who are actually happy as if there is something wrong with them, as if we all believe that is the only acceptable answer.  But, what is the real answer? Does anyone know? Is there actually a real solution? How do we find it? Once it is found, how do we convince billions of people who aren’t OK that there is a better way?  How do we finally, actually heal?

I am reminded of an old saying, “If you want to heal the world, heal yourself", which seems to imply that the outside world is nothing more than a reflection of your inside world. From this alone, the answer seems simple: Feel, heal, and express.

On a conspiracy of Joy,

-Amita