Last week I spoke on a panel for World Mental Health day and one of the big topics was about ‘the Shadow’ that exists in the human psyche. Carl Jung defined ‘the Shadow’ self as the parts of us that we have banished, or deemed unacceptable.
As human beings, we are subject to the full spectrum of emotions and experiences, however, certain feelings and experiences in our culture are judged as being ‘wrong’ or ‘negative’, for instance, anger.
As a young girl growing up I wasn’t allowed to feel angry because it was ugly and unladylike, and no one liked an angry young girl. I learned to cast my anger into the shadow area of my psyche, where I thought it would cease to exist, but shadow parts of ourselves are still very much alive even when we banish them from our conscious.
Its sort of like our plastic garbage problem these days- you might think that just because you took the garbage out to be collected that it is gone forever, but the fact is that it continues to live long after you’ve thrown it away, and because you aren’t bringing it into the light of your consciousness, it becomes a huge problem in other ways.
Feelings and emotions are part of our holistic intelligence and serve a major purpose in our lives. For instance, anger is something that happens when a boundary has been crossed- we get a wave of anger which is the energy needed to reinstate your necessary boundary and communicate our limits. If we are not allowed to feel certain things, we are crippling ourselves from having emotional intelligence.
There are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ feelings. Think about a young child, how they feel everything to the fullest extent, and can move on so quickly from feeling to feeling, not getting stuck in the past, or holding on to the emotion. The feelings are flowing. That is a healthy state of being.
When we have cast certain feelings into the shadow to not be felt, they become emotions that exist as ‘states’ or ‘moods’. When we deny our feelings, they start to fester and get stuck in ‘mood’ states.
Feelings are gentle flowing sensations that tell us how we are doing at the moment. We are supposed to move with them like a child. Each feeling has a unique energy to it and when we can learn to be with these energies, then we are in direct communication with our intuition. Our intuition is our deepest form of knowledge and insight!.
With that, I would like to go through a list of the major feeling categories and what each emotion is trying to tell us in the hopes that it empowers you to feel your feelings and know yourself better.
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