The past couple of weeks, I travelled to be with some of my family – my brother, his wife, and another close friend who all live together – who I also used to live together with. It had been two years since I’d left the city and them, and I could not be there for my brother’s wedding last year. Without a doubt, I have missed them terribly for these two years.
Although, what I have felt since a few weeks preceeding the trip to now can only be described as a very creative cocktail of emotions – longing, missing, excitement, joy, sadness, guilt, relief, pride, and even grief. So, which of these mean anything? Which of these is “right”? Which should I keep with me, and which should I throw?
Emotions can be really confusing sometimes. Especially when we feel so many and so much of them at the same time. Our brain, trained and wired as it is to learn from anything and everything, tries to learn from emotions as well. “What does this mean?”, it asks everytime we feel something. And so, it uses whatever logic it can, to try and come up with conclusions.
“Hey, I was missing them terribly, so it must’ve been wrong of me to leave earlier”
“But I felt good moving to a different place, which means that missing must not be true”
“But I’m excited to see them so maybe my excitement to move wasn’t so ‘real’”
And so on. Confusing isn’t it?
This “conclusion searching” or “judgement forming” part of our brain is not really to blame here. It’s just doing it’s job. But maybe at the moment, we don’t have to take these judgements and conclusions as truths. Maybe they’re just vague possibilities or signals on our journeys. So then, what about all those emotions? How do I sift through them, and what do I do with them?
This is where conscious effort comes in. This is when we pause, notice our tendency to draw conclusions, and instead of taking them as truths, we consciously remind ourselves that they are signals/possibilities. We can then see our emotions for what they truly are – fleeting sensations in our mind and body. Impressions that the world leaves on us – some pleasurable, some not so much.
And we can have whole range of impressions on us. Our self is the ephemeral canvas, and the impressions keep coming and going. All we can really do with them is notice and feel. So, here I am feeling the longing for the presence of my family and my cats, relief to be back home after travel, pride for how much all of us have grown, joy of having spent the amazing few days with them, and so on.
You are bigger than your emotions. They are just a part of your experience. You have the capacity to hold them, to feel them, and to let them go.
Posted to Instagram on 28/03/2023
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