Hello,
My name is Noah Elkrief and in this video I just have a question for you.
Are your emotions acceptable?
Can you accept your emotions?
You see,
In this line of work,
In this self-help,
In this personal development,
In this emotional healing work,
There can be some shadow incentives for why we're working on our emotions.
Why we're trying to heal our emotions,
Why we're trying to get rid of our emotions.
So,
I'd like to speak a little bit about our relationship to our emotions.
What is your relationship to your negative emotions?
You see,
When we have an emotion,
When we have anxiety,
When we have unworthiness,
When we feel hurt,
When we feel sad,
When we feel angry,
There are many different ways we can relate to it.
One of the most common ways is we reject these emotions.
We hate them,
We want to get rid of them,
We want to avoid them,
We want to ignore them,
We blame them for our pain.
And when we have this relationship to our negative emotions,
Even calling them negative,
It doesn't really work well in our system.
We have a fight in our body.
When we fight these emotions,
When we reject these emotions,
It's very hard to see them clearly.
And when we try to get rid of them,
When we try to fix them from this foundational rejection,
Then it doesn't work so well and it's not really very enjoyable.
An alternative to this is when these emotions come that aren't very enjoyable,
We ask ourselves,
Why am I rejecting this emotion?
Why am I trying to get rid of it?
Why am I trying to fix it?
What we might discover is some belief that we picked up somewhere along the way.
It might be,
If I have this emotion,
I'm weak or I'm stupid or I'm bad in some way.
It might be,
I'm not allowed to have this emotion.
In school,
We weren't allowed to have basically any emotion.
At work,
We're not allowed to have emotions.
In high school,
Maybe if we're a woman,
We get told we're dramatic or bitchy.
We're a guy if we have emotions,
We're told that we're soft or weak or gay or something like this.
And so we learn that our emotions aren't acceptable,
Aren't lovable.
Even our parents,
Maybe when we had anxiety,
When we had fear as a child,
When we got angry as a child,
We were told to knock it off.
Or when we felt sad,
Maybe our parents just instantly tried to make us happy again because it made them uncomfortable when we were sad.
So with so many of our emotions that are deemed negative by society,
We reject them because that's what we were taught either very specifically,
Very intentionally,
Like this emotion is bad,
Like don't allow it,
Or just we picked up that assumption or that conclusion somewhere along the way.
So if a negative emotion arises,
When a negative emotion arises,
See what your relationship to it is.
See if you have some belief that it's bad or see if you're blaming it actually.
Sometimes we blame it for our pain.
So when we're angry or when we're sad or when we feel unworthiness,
This emotion is inside of us.
This feeling is inside of us.
And when it comes up,
We're like,
Why are you here again?
I don't want you here.
Why are you doing this to me?
As if it's attacking us,
As if it's the perpetrator.
So I invite you to speak to the emotion.
Talk to it.
Is it really here to hurt you,
To attack you?
Is it really to blame for your sorrow and your inability to do what you want to do?
See if you can say,
I don't want to hate you.
I don't want to fear you.
I don't want to judge you.
Speak to the emotion as if it's alive.
Speak to the emotion as if it's a tangible entity,
A real thing that you're relating to.
If you viewed the emotional energy as alive,
How would you speak to it?
When I first started recognizing it as an alive energy,
I had to say sorry.
I'm really,
Really sorry for how I treated you.
I've been judging you,
Rejecting you,
Pushing you down,
Ignoring you,
Insulting you,
Blaming you without ever checking in about what are you really?
Are you a friend or an enemy?
I don't even know.
Then once we become okay with our emotion,
Once our relationship to our emotion is more friendly,
Then maybe we just naturally want to express it with others or with ourselves or in any way that naturally comes up.
Then maybe it leaves or maybe it stays.
If it leaves,
Beautiful.
If it stays,
It still might not be very enjoyable.
There's this subtlety here.
Subtlety is the right word.
Why do you want to get rid of your negative emotions?
Is it because you reject them,
Hate them,
Blame them,
Have beliefs about them?
Or is it because,
For example,
Maybe you don't want to feel that contraction,
That tension,
That heaviness.
Maybe it's really hard when that emotion is here to be authentic with others.
Maybe it's hard to access your own desires when it's here or something along those lines.
Now when this emotion is here and we stop rejecting it,
We might recognize,
Okay,
I still don't want it here.
It's still not serving me.
So then we can begin to question what's causing it.
How do I let go of it?
But not from hate,
Not from rejection,
Not from non-acceptance,
But just from clarity,
From compassion,
From openness and curiosity and desire instead of from hatred and no,
Go away.
And then this sort of emotional work can feel lighter,
Can feel less pressure on it because so much of the emotional work sometimes that I saw with myself and with other people is,
It's just another form of improving.
Like the same way you keep trying to make more money or keep trying to get more success so you can finally be worthy,
We do the same thing with emotions.
Like I have to keep getting rid of my negative emotions so one day I can have no negative emotions,
Then I'm worthy,
Then I'm enlightened,
Then I'm happy,
Then I'm an authentic person,
And then finally I'm worthy.
But I'm sort of here with the message today that all of your emotions are lovable,
All of your emotions are acceptable,
And not having emotion doesn't make you somehow better or more worthy or anything along those lines.
So that's that.
I wish you luck in this exploration and discovery.
Bye.
