We Must Be Willing To Feel Everything

I posted earlier this week about "hate."

No one likes the word "hate" - it has become "the unacceptable emotion."
It is like Voldemort - hate is "he who shall not be named."

Hate is associated with so many horrific things that we can hardly say the word anymore.
 
Yet as long as we fear any emotion or thought, we are prisoners; unable to grow.


In order to have anything in life, we have to be willing to have the opposite.

In order to get married, we must open ourselves to the possibility of divorce.
In order to have faith, we have to be willing to doubt, to question, to learn and grow.
In order to have courage, we must be willing to fear.
In order to love, we must be willing to hate. We have to be willing to care about someone that much. We have to be that invested, that deeply attached.
In order to trust we have to open ourselves up to the possibility of being betrayed, abandoned, let down.

When any emotion or feeling becomes unacceptable, then we lose the correlating emotion. When we are unwilling to to be betrayed, we lose the ability to trust.
If we are unwilling to lose, we are unable to win.
If we are are unwilling to be rejected, we are unable to be accepted.

We must be vulnerable. All emotions must be a possibility. All emotions must be acceptable.
When we accept the fact that we feel and think horrific things, AND we can still act according to our values - then we have happiness.  Then we have self mastery.
We can think and feel anything, be put through any horror or atrocity, and still be ourselves, living our life. When we can become like Viktor Frankl - be stripped of everything, have our jobs and homes and livelihoods taken, have our family killed, and be forced to work in a Nazi concentration camp - and still live our values, still have a life of meaning - then we have success.  Then we have happiness. Then we have a life worth living.