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The Creative Power of Our Emotions
by Patricia F. Hare, M.A.T., M.A.

No Hankies Please (It was a long time ago...)

When I was in my early teens, my father was diagnosed with cancer. He suffered from both the disease and the treatment for four years before his death. During this time, my family members and I rarely spoke of his illness. We talked instead about schedules, who would do which chores, who would handle this or that. Daddy was in the hospital a good bit of this time and maintaining a household with four teenagers while trying to be with and care for him was not an easy task for us, as anyone who's dealt with this kind of illness well knows.

To all appearances, however, we handled it superbly. There were a few bumpy spots here and there, but we put our energy into making things work, being brave, and getting through it. But you know what they say about appearances.

I remember one day shortly before my father's death when I was leaving after a visit with him at the hospital. I stood outside the door to his room and looked back at him. He looked so frail, enveloped by the white, crisp sheets. I had this overwhelming urge to run back to him, lay my head on his chest, and plead, Daddy, don't die! Please don't die!

But I didn't. Instead, I simply said in as casual a tone as I could muster, Bye, Daddy, and walked down the corridor and out to my car just as I'd done so many times before.

We never discussed the potentiality of his death in our family. Oh, I'm sure he and my mother had talked about the insurance and finances and funeral arrangements and however much of their feelings they could share and still feel brave. But as a family, my memory is that we never talked about his death at all. At some point during his last year of illness, I'd pretty much figured out where things were headed.

Years later, as an adult, when I first head the expression, "an elephant in the living room," I laughed in recognition. The phrase was associated with alcoholism, but it applies to any significant yet unspoken condition or concern in a family (or other group, for that matter). The idea behind the phrase is that even though there is an "elephant" (an alcohol or drug abuse problem, for example) in the living room—big as life and taking up all that space—the family goes about its business, acting as if everything is normal, denying reality as a way of coping.

I and my siblings took the lead from our parents as how to handle the situation. If they weren't going to talk about it, then it must not be appropriate for us to do so either. As I grew older, I came to realize that this silence—this unspoken taboo against talking about our feelings about what was happening—was a protection device, designed to save us from feeling emotions that ran deep and were truly painful.

Only it didn't work. I still felt loss and frustration and powerlessness and fear and love and need. And the other members of my family did, too. But it made it easier to get up each day and do what had to be done as long as we could pretend we didn't feel these feelings—or so we thought.

I don't believe this personal family tragedy story is so unique. Most of us have had similar experiences with pain and pretending due to illness, alcoholism, drug abuse, physical or sexual abuse, unexpected death, homosexuality, divorce, unemployment, accident or other events which can place the family in crisis.

And I don't believe the way in which my parents responded is so unique, either. They came into adulthood in the 1940s, a time when the world view was much more black and white. Roles were rigidly defined and the cultural influence of the industrial revolution was at its peak. During these years and several decades to follow, people who went around emoting were an embarrassment, considered immature and not to be taken seriously.

To my knowledge, there were no Ozzie and Harriet episodes which dealt with death. And if there were, the issue would have been sensibly and rationally handled, I'm sure. Harriet's crying would have been kept to a minimum.

The social rebellions of the 1960s and 70s—instigated by baby boomers tired of the perceived falseness, shallowness, and denial of the Ozzie and Harriet world—did a lot to bring feelings out into the open. The establishment-minded often pooh-poohed this effort by labeling any activity designed to help people get in touch with their emotions as "touchy-feely." But this new generation hung in there, and now—over 30 years later—we are still spending millions of dollars each year on an array of physical as well as psychological activities and therapies designed to help us get back in touch with our emotions.

Why is this? What is it about our emotions that causes us to fear them so much yet want—and need—to experience them so fully?

Energy In Motion

I have given much study and thought to the subject of emotions since those difficult teen years. As I explore the nature of human consciousness, I find that human emotion continuously appears as a major component of both the physical and spiritual worlds. And I have come to believe emotions to be one of the most powerful tools we have for creating and experiencing life.

In short: Emotions make life real. This is why we fear them and this is why we want to feel them.

A family whose members do not allow themselves to feel the sadness of the approaching death of a member can pretend, for a time, that the situation is not real. A parent who does not allow herself to acknowledge the differences in her son can pretend that he is not homosexual and protect herself from the sometimes difficult feelings that accompany such an acknowledgement. A husband who casually dismisses his wife's heavy drinking as "just going though a rough patch," can pretend she is not alcoholic and protect himself from the certainly difficult feelings involved in facing this problem.

As long as we are able to separate ourselves from the emotions we are feeling about any given situation, we can protect ourselves from pain, discomfort, facing things that we don't want to face, and hurt. Or so we think. And price we pay is frighteningly high: Emotional numbness.

Along with the decision not to feel our hurt, we automatically have decided also not to feel our joy. When we deny ourselves the ability to feel pain, we cut ourselves off from feeling pleasure. We can't feel the fullness of the "good" emotions unless we are willing to also feel the heaviness of the "bad" emotions.

Now, I'm not saying that we have to feel "bad" emotions in order to feel the "good" ones; I'm saying that we have to be willing to feel them all whenever they present themselves. That's just the way it works. So to keep ourselves emotionally safe and comfortable—whether we realize it or not—we become numb.

You may know someone who has become numb. Numb people are generally very even-tempered. They don't get mad often, but they don't get joyous often, either. They get up each day and respond to as little as possible. They don't waste time on tears and they certainly don't have too jolly a laugh. They tend to rely on rational thinking and simple logic when making decisions. They don't come off like the night of the living dead, or anything like that—they're usually quite harmless. But they can be hell to try to have a relationship with.

The good news is that modern times are inspiring us out of our numbness! Too much is happening in the world today at all levels to allow many of us to stay numb for long. Nothing jolts us out of numbness like a good crisis, and we now have a veritable smorgasbord of crises to choose from!

It's easy to see the harm that can come from denying or suppressing emotions and appreciate the pleasure that can be gained from expressing them more fully and freely. I know of no one who failed to grow and become happier and more confident as a result of expressing and facing a fear, however difficult it may have been to do.

However, the power of emotion lies not only in allowing us to live our lives authentically, making our days not just days but rich tapestries of experience. It also lies in the creative nature of emotion: The ability of emotion to actively influence the events and experiences of our lives.

Emotions have been described as energy in motion. Creative energy we can feel running through our being. Think of a time of great joy or sadness. Wasn't there a strong bodily experience that went along with the emotion? What you felt was not "just" an emotion, it was a wave of energy which carried a specific vibration or feeling-tone that corresponded to the experience you were having.

Sadness is experienced in one vibrational range. Joy another. Contentment has its own vibrational patterns. So do anger, fear, fulfillment, excitement, playfulness, and all the other emotional experiences available to us. The vibrations we feel match our experience. You could say that we resonate to an experience by feeling the emotion that corresponds.

Parties tend to create one type of vibration (unless, of course, you're hiding behind "the tears of a clown"). Funerals create another. Patriotic songs, love stories, adventure movies, baby showers, and job promotions all have their own particular ranges of vibrational patterns that we experience as emotions.

Consciousness Creates

Now, here's something really neat to know about human consciousness: We are able to not only respond to events and experiences with emotion, but we can also create events and experiences with emotion. Yep, that's right; I said create. You can prove it to yourself with a very simple experiment.

Spend one week frowning. Force yourself to frown whenever you can. Even if you don't feel like frowning, frown. You'll notice that the physical act of frowning will help you to feel sad, and maybe a little forlorn. Keep a diary of the events of the week. At the end of the week look at the types of experiences you had.

Or you can go another route—smiling. Smile all week long. The act of smiling will help you to maintain the feeling of happiness and maybe a little kindness thrown in for good measure. Keep your diary. At the end of the week look at the types of experiences you had.

Those things didn't just happen because others were responding to your frown or your smile, though surely that plays a role in the creation of experience. When you frowned, you generated a sad feeling tone/vibration throughout your body which attracted experiences matching that vibration. Likewise when you smiled—your smile helped you to feel pleasant, generating a feeling tone/vibration of pleasantness which caused pleasant events to be more noticeable in your experience.

It helps to think of emotions as magnets, drawing to us matching vibrational experiences. In reality, all experiences are available to us at any given moment, but by generating within ourselves certain feelings, we cause ourselves to be able to most easily notice those experiences which closely match our vibration. It's a simple matter of like attracts like.

One of the reasons "miracles" occur is because consciously or unconsciously we have employed this technique of creation. Let's say there's something that we need badly—$500 to pay the rent by Friday. We have no job, we know of no one we can borrow the money from, and we haven't a clue as to where we're going to get $500 by Friday. So we pray and put the matter into God's hands.

If our faith is strong and we believe that God will answer our prayer, we will cease to feel worried about the $500 and will trust that it'll show up from somewhere. Our feeling tone/vibration acts as a magnet, drawing to us an experience in which the money does indeed come from somewhere. Then we call it a miracle from God.

There are billions of people on this planet alone, all wanting to fulfill Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. I believe it will be a relief and a joy to our Maker when we stop asking for so much to be done for us and begin to take greater responsibility for creating it for ourselves using our own natural, God-given abilities. The loving parent trains his or her child to one day live independently. The greatest joy of that relationship comes when the two are together by choice, rather than by need. I can't imagine that God would feel differently about it.

The Spiritual Connection

This leads me to the final point I'd like to make about the power of emotion: It is through our emotions that we can establish and develop a richer and deeper spiritual relationship with God/Goddess/Spirit—however you think of our Creator. As we become more attuned to our feeling natures and more familiar with our own inner landscapes of blooming flowers and stormy clouds, we become better able to hear and respond to what is often called, "the still, small voice of God."

(Actually, I don't think God's voice is either still or small. It's just that we're so out of touch with our inner selves that when we receive inner guidance, it can sound like God is speaking from the next universe over. As we mature as spiritual beings, perhaps one day it will be called, "the vibrant, booming voice of God.")

Spiritual life is an inner experience, although the quality of our spiritual life is reflected for us in the external world. We are not happenstances of evolution, as some have declared. We are the created beings of a wondrous Creator. Whether we know it or not, we are connected to this Creator. What we call spiritual life is the growing understanding and development of our connection to the Creator, forming and deepening a personal relationship.

When we want to communicate with this Creator, we participate in activities such as prayer and meditation. We go within, searching for points of connection to God. The more in touch we are with our feelings, the more we will be able to recognize those connecting points and receive the guidance and reassurance we're looking for. This guidance and reassurance will come in the form of intuitions, hunches, or strong feelings that this or that is the right way to approach a situation.

Science has brought us many good things, but it has also robbed us of this very important means of connecting to God. Feelings are difficult to measure, quantify, and prove in a laboratory. So science has discredited them as a waste of time and of no real value, except perhaps to the weak and unenlightened (i.e., women and children—'cause we all know that real men don't cry).

The big news of the 21^st Century is that there is a dynamic spiritual world behind the creation of the physical world and our emotions are an important link between the two. They add richness and authenticity to our lives, they support our ability to create for ourselves, and they open doorways of relationship and communication with God, whatever "God" means to us individually.

So the next time you experience an emotion, honor it! Explore it. Feel it. Respond to it. And THANK it. Be it fear or joy, love or anger, it is a part of your Divine Inheritance and it will help to lead you back Home.

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