By Ana Montana

It seems that ¨being positive¨ has become a new form of moral correctness. Most of us judge ourselves for having so-called ¨bad emotions¨ like sadness, anger or even grief. We try to push aside these feelings instead of trying to see how valuable these emotions can be.

As far as I know, natural emotions shouldn’t be ¨good or bad¨, but for some reason, as for most of the things we can’t really explain, we’ve managed to classify them because we like to feel good, and positive emotions feel just… good. But when we try so hard to push aside our natural emotions and try to embrace false positivity, we’re losing our capacity to develop skills to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.

 If you ask anyone, they pretty much KNOW what they DON’T want to feel. No one WANTS to feel sad or disappointed, we always want these feelings to ¨just go away¨. But the truth is that tough emotions are part of our contract with life. We don’t get to experience hapiness  without ever experiencing some stress or discomfort. Discomfort is some sort of price admission to a meaningful life.

The point of personal development isn’t to feel happy all the time, in fact, I really truly believe that permanent, unflappable happines doesn’t exist. ¨Negative¨ emotions are important because they’re a natural part of life, just as the colors of the rainbow run from one end of a spectrum to another, so do our emotions. We might prefer the experience of certain emotions, but whether we like it or not… they will ALL show up at some point of our life.

The more we resist negative emotions, the more we will suffer. ¨Negative¨ emotions are useful! Fear, anger, rejection, pain… all these feelings are useful emotional responses to certain situations. Instead of pushing them away, we could try to learn how to manage them so they can serve their natural purpose.

When we struggle to accept certain feelings , it’s usually because we are attaching a story or meaning to that feeling. Let’s separate out the feeling from that story or meaning! and allow ourselves to truly feel the feeling.

Maybe from now on, instead of referring to them as ¨bad feelings¨, we could just call them ¨uncomfortable feelings¨. Just because they’re uncomfortable it doesn’t mean they’re negative. All feelings happen for a reason, and though it might not be immediately obvious, there’s a reason. Let’s try to find the reasons behind our feelings. The more exploration we are willing to do, the more information we’ll have and then we can take action to find the right balance and bring harmony to our life.