“Life’s beauty is inseparable from its fragility.”
Susan David gives a superb TED talk “The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage” about embracing your emotions no matter how “negative” they seem.
- “Normal, natural emotions are now seen as good or bad. And being positive has become a new form of moral correctness. People with cancer are automatically told to just stay positive. Women, to stop being so angry. And the list goes on. It’s a tyranny. It’s a tyranny of positivity. And it’s cruel. Unkind. And ineffective. And we do it to ourselves, and we do it to others…Research on emotional suppression shows that when emotions are pushed aside or ignored, they get stronger. Psychologists call this amplification… I started to do away with feelings of what I should be experiencing. And instead started to open my heart to what I did feel. Pain. And grief. And loss. And regret… Research now shows that the radical acceptance of all of our emotions — even the messy, difficult ones — is the cornerstone to resilience, thriving, and true, authentic happiness…When you feel a strong, tough emotion, don’t race for the emotional exits. Learn its contours, show up to the journal of your hearts. What is the emotion telling you?”
One of the tricks I learned when I was quite young was assuaging physical pain with mindfulness. Rather than fighting or reacting to it, I actually focused on the discomfort and found that it dissipated much more quickly with mindfulness. Similar to a mediation technique of not rejecting thoughts and sensations that enter your mind during practice, but observing them and letting them go.
Emotions don’t run much more intense than at the peak of athletic achievement. Often a lifetime of dreams brought to a single moment of truth. This past week has been full of the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” with the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. But Olympic champion skier Mikaela Shiffrin eloquently conveys how the emotions are a bit more subtly textured than that. She articulates a brilliant display of embracing even the adverse emotions as part of the rich tapestry of feelings:
- "I’ve gone over it a thousand times in my head, and I don’t think I could have done it differently even if I got a second chance. I keep thinking that maybe if I was able to control my emotions more after the Giant Slalom, I would have had more energy for the Slalom and maybe I could have put more into that race, maybe I would have had better control of my nerves, maybe… But after 5 days of schedule changes and waiting to race, and without the day between those races to reset and recharge, I wasn’t able to manage it. And you know what? I wouldn’t change that for the world. It’s the Olympics, and for me that’s about showing heart and passion as much as it is about medals. So I wouldn’t take back my emotions or excitement after the GS in order to have better shot at a SL medal too. You know, it’s not necessarily the medalists who get the most out of the Olympics. It’s those who are willing to strip down to nothing and bear their soul for their love of the game. That is so much greater than Gold, Silver, or Bronze. We all want a medal, but not everyone will get one. Some are going to leave here feeling like heroes, some will leave heartbroken, and some will have had moments when the felt both- because we care. That is real. That is life. It’s amazing and terrifying and wonderful and brutal and exciting and nerve racking and beautiful. And honestly, I’m just so grateful to be part of that.”
