When we experience a difficult emotion, we can lose sight of the value of the emotion as a messenger. But these messages through our emotions are useful and valuable in understanding ourselves and our relationship with the world around us.
As humans, we experience a range of emotions throughout life, some are uplifting and vibrant, others are mellow and some are dark and, in the shadows, supressed by our unwillingness to engage with them. For the emotions that we struggle with in particular, wouldn’t it be useful to have a way to view them that allows you to acknowledge them, using them to move through to a more comfortable place?
Alchemy is the process of changing the nature of something, such as a base matter like lead, into gold. The transmuting (changing) of metals is an alchemic process that operates on physical levels in the outer world. Clearly there are also parallels in our inner emotional world.
Emotional alchemy is a process whereby we can convert an emotion into something of greater value for us.
The Emotion is the Messenger
The first step is to see our emotions as messengers that provide us with valuable information. For example, anger may mean that our standards have been dishonoured. Guilt may indicate that we have been in breach of our own standards. Anxiety is a way of alerting us to danger. These emotions are part of our human survival kit. They are there to help us make decisions and form our experience of life.
Sometimes the emotional messenger can be over enthusiastic, and we find ourselves responding inappropriately to situations. There is still a value in assessing how our responses to these things are linked to a situation or a trigger that can be linked to something in the past. This insight gives us insight into where we need to nurture ourselves and our emotions to bring healing and balance to our emotional self.
It is also important not to get caught up in the emotion rather seeing it as the messenger sign posting us on our way forwards and beyond the current state.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger
We live in a world that encourages us to suppress or ignore our emotional messenger, encouraging us to carry on regardless. Avoiding them by supressing them with food, exercise, alcohol or medication our messengers to the point where we are no longer able to hear them or engage with them fully. By stopping our inner messenger from speaking openly with us, we miss the good news as well as the warnings, depriving us of our inner feedback system.
By allowing ourselves to ‘listen out’ for the messages we allow ourselves the benefit of this internal dialogue and can then make use it for our benefit.
Understanding that our emotions are messages allows us to value them differently. To see them as information, important and worth listening to! We see physical symptoms as a guide towards self-care and emotions are no different. It can be difficult, intense and challenging to face our emotions and in turn this can obscure the message. We need to allow ourselves to pause, listen and look a little deeper into what sits behind each emotion we feel.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom
So, it is important to view the emotion as a message and explore what the information might be. By using the energy of each emotion, we can direct it towards a positive action. Finally trying to see the emotion and its message as the beginning of a journey that can allow you to experience growth you will learn to value each emotion and enjoy inner peace.
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