What does it mean to own your emotions?

What a great Ecotrain Question of the Week.

Emotion can be symbolized by water. If we look at this in terms of the ocean, we have a large body of water with varying depths, turbidity, shifts and changes throughout the day given the weather and even what types of animals and boats are moving through it.

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Emotions, in our culture, are thought of as feminine and, because our culture is still dominated by a patriarchal valuation system where rationality, objectivity and thought are prized over their "seeming opposites", subjectivity, feeling and intuition, we have a long way to go, as a culture, to value and be connected to our emotional states.

When we are young, for example, we aren't practiced at manipulating or hiding our emotions. We just let it all flow in the present moment. Crying one moment, joyous the next. When we reach adulthood, we've learned how to "control" our emotional responses, which largely means holding them in and not processing them.

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First, what are emotions?

Emotion can be defined as

a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others.

I would go a step further and say that emotion is not only "a state of mind", but an experience in the body in relationship with our interactions with stimulus in the environment (which also includes our inner environment.)

Because of the devaluing of emotion in our culture and because half of the population who have male genital organs are by and large taught to suppress or control their emotions - and many women are taught this as well to "survive" in our culture, we have a long way to go to truly relating to our emotions in a healthy way.

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I really liked @riverflows response to this question as she talked about a very buddhist way of relating with our emotions and being aware of them, yet not being attached to them or thinking of them as ours.

For anyone not exactly familiar with this approach, I would recommend reading her post.

That being said, I'm going to take a different and complementary approach to her response and start with what I believe is a First Step that many of us need to take in relation with our emotions.

The first step to "owning" our emotions (which I really believe is a type of relating) is to get in touch with them. I was going to write "stop suppressing them", but I believe a better way to encourage emotional literacy is to create positive statements around it and not to tell someone to "stop doing something."

So how does one get in touch with their emotions?

In the ocean of emotion that is available to us as humans, many see emotions as something that must be controlled lest it "take over" or overwhelm us, much like an ocean wave.

At times, emotions can certainly be overwhelming and dominate our experience of the present moment. It's understandable that a world which values rational and "cool" responses would foremost seek to shut down this inner experience. However, if we "shut down" our emotional responses, what this really does is create a dead-pan inner life lacking Color & Imagination, one which cuts us off from the full range of experience.

Tears are our bodies' way of processing sadness. Tears themselves contain stress hormones so it's actually a healing process to cry to release these. They also contain endorphins which reduce pain and lift the mood which explains why we may feel better after a "good cry".

How do we seek a balance?

I think this is another way to answer "What does it mean to own our emotions?". How do we exist and thrive without getting overwhelmed or "taken over" by our emotions while also attending to the messages they bring us?

Thanks to @kennyskitchen to hooking me up with this song: Waves of Emotion from his friends' group, Andy Babb and the Big Beautiful Band! Perfectly conveys riding the waves of the ocean of emotion! Give it a listen!

There are a lot of awkward moments before you get the hang of it!

Well the good news is that the more familiar we get with our emotions, the more comfortable, the less they threaten to overwhelm us in the same way. It's also like familiarizing ourselves with being in the ocean. When waves come to a surfer, if they are experienced, they know how to ride the wave instead of getting sucked under and thrown to the ocean floor or drowned. I imagine, however, that leading up to that ability to actually surf were many awkward even painful or scary moments.

If the surfer stopped and threw in the towel, they'd never get to ride the wave. They could just say The ocean is far too big and overwhelming for me. I'm not cut out for this. But, with some practice, instead they can ride the wave. Such it is with our emotions.

Takes a lot of practice to ride the wave!

To those used to cutting themselves off from emotion or suppressing it, any experience of inner emotion can be terrifying.

When starting in that state, using the techniques @riverflows talked about in her post of being mindfully aware of the emotion but not getting attached to it are of utmost importance. It becomes a dance of recognizing the emotion, not suppressing or ignoring it, but also not getting completely swept away with it. I agree with her, "owning our emotions" can look something like this.

Getting Personal

What about my experience?

The key I'm getting at is that Owning is very different than Ignoring, which I see as a major trend and which is something I even can do at times.

Just the other day, after a busy few days in my life, I woke up one morning and practiced a technique that really helps me get in touch with and relate to my emotions called "Feeding My Demons" (see more here). As I practiced it, I started crying and felt the well of emotion within me start to release. In the busyness of my life, I had not stopped to truly connect with myself and my experience.

As I practiced Feeding my Demons, which includes relating to our emotions, especially the "difficult to experience ones" and nurturing them, I felt so much release inside of me and parts of me I hadn't been in touch with started to feel seen and in that process I felt relief, light and love start to fill my body.

We are taught to fight demons instead of feeding them, but that only exacerbates them.

What this process of nourishing them has taught me is that these demons are really just aspects of my experience that I have ignored. Through this ignorance, the healthy impulse or message the specific energy is bringing me has thwarted and even morphed into an unhealthy expression because it's upset it hasn't been seen/heard/valued. Contrary to the basic fear that if we feed the demon it will become larger and even more "difficult to deal with", my experience is that once these are seen/listened to/responded to they usually relax.

After all, isn't that also what happens to us if/when we are heard/seen/valued?

I know I can get mad if someone isn't listening to me and relax when I am heard.

So these demons are just a part of our experience and for whatever reason we've cut them off. I think it's a common experience, but many don't know the tools to be in relation with them. Difficult emotions can be scary and this lack of literacy that is prevalent causes many of us to walk around detached from our experience. Being in touch with our emotions in this way is a very healthy shift.

Personally, I have found that getting in touch with anxiety, sadness, anger, depression, crazy feelings, pain, self abuse, relational troubles, challenging life experiences and more through the process of Feeding my Demons, is truly liberating for me. It's helped me realize that these emotions experienced in my body are there for a reason, actually they have messages for me that make me a more whole and healed person if I hear them.

We only have "half an experience" if we go through life not heeding our emotions. Once we get the hang of relating to our emotions, it can be a beautiful process like Rumi talks about in his poem, the guest house. It is natural to "shy away" from painful experience, but there is usually a wealth of information there and freedom once we go through it (not ignore it forever.)

These are my thoughts this Sunday morning on What it means to own emotions. My piece took a slant near the end of being in relation with difficult emotions (as I think most of us naturally have more ease relating to "positive/easy" emotions, but I'd like to also mention that in cutting off difficult emotions, it makes our whole emotional gauge out of whack and we can't experience the light and uplifting emotions as well either. They all go hand in and and if we have a habit of holding emotions in, it can create an emotional backlog, much like the one I mentioned above.

I'd encourage you to take part in answering the question this week (due Thursday) if you feel it! Use #ecotrain tag if you do so more people will see your response. Over the next few weeks, we'll be continuing a series on emotion also answering the questions:

1. How open are you about your emotions?
2. Do you appreciate others to be open about their emotions?

Thanks for reading and stopping by! Hope you have a great day! I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the subject so please leave them below!