Either Or
Either repress your pain or talk to the person causing it.
Those are the options we're told we have, when relational crunchies come to call.
Do you try to let the other person's hurtful behavior go, or do you try to speak to them directly about it?
Truly, these are both bad options, and I've heard it said that we don't really have a choice until we have at least THREE options.
With Emotional Mastery, I accept and own my feelings and my experience and distinguish every component of my emotional experience. This means I have infinite ways to address what's happening, within me, with others, and between me and the person it seems to be about.
Each component of an emotional experience offers me many paths to process it.
An emotional experience is the furthest thing from a static object in the world, and treating it like an object, to either place on a shelf or hand off to someone else, is a frustratingly doomed practice.
An emotional experience is an entire system, and for all its intricacy, it's actually *not that important.*
Yes, I know, shocked gasps.
“But Hannah, are you saying that feelings don't matter?”
No, love, I maintain that feelings are all that matters, and there are absolutely feelings which inform my every way of being.
But emotions are not those feelings.
Emotions are what happens while I follow the feelings that actually matter.
Emotions are like waves on the ocean. I don't use them to navigate. All that matters in the waves is that I'm in a seaworthy vessel.
Trusting in my palpable compass heading, trusting in my vessel, I navigate across and over and via waves of emotion.
Emotional Mastery is a nuanced practice I'm teaching twice in the next two weeks. It's one of the ways I define my adulthood, that I have responsibility for my emotional experience and expression, that I have agility and skill which allow my emotional expression to increase intimacy with my loved ones.
This is a foundational way in which I Am the One for me. I am the one this life is for, I am the one this experience is for, I am the one my emotional expression is for. I Am the One.
