What's worse?

Many of us are emotionally starving for what Robert Stolorow calls a 'relational home': another human being who can hold a space for us to feel what we feel and be who we are in that moment.

Instead, what many of us get are shaming messages; what we feel and who we are is wrong.

There is such a strong phobia of "negative" emotions at the moment. If you have or feel an emotion on the "negative" list, you're vibrating too low, or you're dragging everyone else down. It's all about positivity, but a fake and forced positivity which is absolutely exhausting.

Emotions come and go, if we let them. We will never reach a point where we'll have gotten rid of fear, anger or jealousy forever. That's not supposed to happen because emotions have a purpose. Fear can be life saving, anger can help us set boundaries and jealousy can show us what we really want.

Do you know what's worse than feeling a so-called low vibration emotion? Repressing, suppressing, disowning, denying and pushing away your emotions. Worse in the sense that you'll have to meet these disowned emotions sooner or later. In the meantime the body takes them on for us, patiently waiting for us to feel them, only that never happens for some of us, so our system starts to overflow with symptoms because it can only take so much.

Our shadow is where we shove all the stuff we don't want to be, see, feel or what others found distasteful in us, especially when we were children. But the shadow doesn't go away, it only gets bigger the more we disown it.

We can see evidence of the individual and collective shadow everywhere at the moment and it ain't pretty, but looking away isn't going to help. We need to dive deeper. Our lives depend on it.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious ~ Carl Jung