Wouldn’t it be nice if we had clear, bright lines between good and bad, between right and wrong, between what is necessary and what is too much?
Wouldn’t it be helpful if we could clearly delineate between us and them, between past and future, between me and we?
Wouldn’t it be so much easier if we were capable of feeling only one emotion at a time, and if we didn’t have to feel the “icky” ones at all?
Alas, that is not the reality of life.
Life is murky.
The lines aren’t always so bright and clear.
And those emotions?
Despite popular myth that “love is the antidote to fear,” it turns out that we are quite capable of feeling many different emotions at the same time. In fact, it’s one of our greatest capacities as human beings.
Love and fear.
Joy and grief.
Hope and despair.
Anger and compassion.
Being human is complicated. There’s not one path of how we experience events and emotions. There’s no formula for how to handle challenging moments.
But there is a pattern that has proven to be destructive:
Resisting what is.
Avoidance or resistance may seem like good strategies to stay “happy,” but ultimately this will fail to create lasting positive energy. What we resist or push away inevitably comes up in ways that sabotage our efforts.
Our reactions to “triggers” stem from pushing away the things we don’t want to feel.
It’s natural to want to feel only the “good” — to pursue the activities and experiences that help us feel confident, that infuse our life with joy, that create states of happiness.
But those positive states are hollow unless we also learn to be with what’s uncomfortable.
The fullness of joy is only experienced when we’ve learned to sit in our grief. We can find compassion by sitting with our anger. Despair can be the soil for the seeds of hope.
Fear and love are often co-present. In fact, fear can be driven by love.
The dual skill of being with the difficult emotions and of being with conflicting emotions — of parsing out the threads and feeling how they show up in the body, of learning how to be with all of it — allows us to operate our lives from a place of aligned intention rather than from reaction.
This is the skill of the Spiritual Warrior.
And it’s an essential skill of the modern leader, especially in our current world.
Love it? Hate it? What do you think? Don't hold back...