Things that are bottled.

How important is breathing?  Sometimes I get so wrapped up in my emotions.  There are words, feelings, and people take my breath away.  I don’t see anything wrong with that, but sometimes I forget to breathe again.  I let what’s important to me consume me, which begs the question: Is that an asset or a liability?

I try my best to be aware of my emotions as I’m feeling them, before they bubble up to the surface and I’m ambushed with nothing but a fight-or-flight reflex with which to answer.  Sometimes I falter, though, as humans tend to do – but I’m not going to use that as a crutch to avoid taking responsibility for the times when I let my emotions get the best of me.

Not so long ago, I thrived on the idea that I could always be happy if I chose to be.  It worked for a little while until everything other than happiness that I had been pushing down and bottling away built an enormous amount of pressure and sadness inside me.  That’s when I realized I was projecting “happy”, yet keeping all the “sad” in storage.  That wasn’t what I wanted!  The method I was executing did not align with my goal of being happy!  It dawned on me then how important it is to let myself feel everything.  I needed to accept my emotions for what they were.  I needed to acknowledge their presence, then move on, instead of what I was doing which was archiving them inside of myself.  I made the huge error of keeping everything I didn’t want in, in.  To date, that remains one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned.  I’m glad I was able to pick it up when I did.  Lessons present themselves when we’ve earned them.  Repeated mistakes represent lessons we’ve yet to earn, and therefore have yet to learn.

It’s an ongoing process that I’m learning a bit more about every day.