By Claudia Castillo Epstein
Normally when someone asks us, «how are you?» the immediate and almost automatic answer is «fine.»
There are times when yes, the answer is «fine,» but there are many other times when the real and honest answer is not that.
We coexist with a very strong tendency and an almost obligation to always have to be fine. We live in a culture that promotes as one more of its consumer strategies the good/well-being, the empty and superficial positivism, letting things «flow» everything has a «why» and a «what for.»
With phrases, pictures of landscapes, and selfies always smiling hung on the walls of our social networks, we find the easy and quick way out to hide and disguise the small big part of us that is not well.
I certainly celebrate and support individual and collective efforts to experience an increasingly healthy, harmonious, and balanced life. But I do not agree with or promote wellness that focuses only on being well «from the outside» and that pushes us to wear a smiling and evasive mask that disconnects us from what we really feel and what is happening inside.
It puts us in an internal place where we cannot or do not want to take responsibility for what is really happening to us and we conveniently look for the «nice» positive side of the issue; and let life go on, without going deep, without feeling, without questioning, carrying a blindness and comfort where we leave to chance, to God, to the universe, to someone else to solve what is ours and that only corresponds to us to assume and solve.
It is impossible for us to be well all the time. We have to resignify the idea that it is wrong to be bad, that we should be ashamed of our sadness, anger, anxieties, worries, doubts, chaos, and so on.
We have learned this behavior pattern since we were children, after we grew up in a family and experienced educational and social spaces, where the adults around us did not have the time or the internal tools to listen, accompany, and teach us what to do with our emotions.
So what we do is to keep quiet, evade, and bury what we feel to gradually become people who do not confront, who do not know how to deal with conflict, with discomfort, with differences; and, sadly, we are silencing our feelings and our true voice.
However, let us remember that energy is not destroyed, it must be transformed. And whether we like it or not, everything we experience makes us feel something. So, the question is, what happens with all the emotions I feel? All that emotional energy is stored, accumulated, and if we do not learn the ability to recognize it, to know with which experience or which person it is connected, and above all to know how to let them out and let them go, we become the emotions that we repress.
Instead of feeling sadness, we are sad people. Instead of feeling angry, we are angry people. And then emotions not only transform our mood and personality, but they also cloud our mind, our decisions, relationships, choices, and the lens through which we see the world.
We must understand that emotions are great teachers and bridges to our inner world. They are automatically showing us non-rational responses to what is happening to us.
Each of these topics are territories of shifting sands, and recognizing that each of us are unique universes, I invite you to reflect on how your emotional world is, what relationship you have with your emotions, and to take the time and space to sit in silence to listen to those parts of you that have not been well for I don’t know how long.
Those parts are the keys to your expansion, release and wholeness. They are the space, though thorny, full of answers and life.
