A very wise teacher once told me, “The degree to which you open to some of the deeper emotions such as anger and loss, is the same degree to which you will experience joy and bliss. You can’t expand in just direction. It doesn’t work that way.”

Most of us have a hard time expressing some of these deeper emotions such as anger. Living in joy means cultivating our awareness of what we’re feeling from moment to moment. Accepting every emotion as it is. The deeper we can look at the not-so-nice feelings the more insight we can gain about our true desires.

So, living a life full of joy and inner tranquility does not mean that we push our deeper emotions like anger aside. It means that we learn to meet them with patience and compassion. As we sit with and patiently experience the emotion, we uncover the want, our unmet desire. We might expose the feeling of abandonment, and our unfulfilled desire to be accepted. Or we might discover feelings of jealousy and hurt buried deep inside the capsule we call anger.

Then we can say to ourselves, “Oh – anger, I see you. I am not afraid of you. I can sit with you and be uncomfortable without a need to fix the situation.” And right there – in that moment of realization – the anger begins to dissipate. It loses some of its power.

Written by Della Temple, a BPI graduate who writes, teaches, and heals.