Brilliant One,

>> Here’s the AUDIO of today’s Practice Guidance.

What do you do with your most intense, most unwanted feelings, like when you feel hurt, rageful or just incredibly sad?

The answer depends on where you are in the journey of your life and your awakening.

When you are a child (chronologically or spiritually), you think and speak and act like a child — and you feel and react to your feelings like a child, too.

And that primal, inborn, immature reaction loop goes like this: You touch the hot stove, you jerk your hand back. The end.

When you’re a child, you do the same thing with your feelings.

The knee-jerk reaction of trying to run from whatever it was that made you feel how you feel, trying not to feel what you feel, jerking back, denying your feelings, building up touchy subjects where you just won’t go, or shoving your feelings down, that sort of Emotional Maturity Level One.

When you mature a tiny bit, you may learn to reframe your feelings, which might make them a tiny bit more tolerable. Sometimes this is appropriate, like reframing fear as excitement, because that’s actually what it is.

All fear is unintegrated excitement.

But other times, reframing is just a slightly more clever way to shove your feelings down, to mute the devastation, or the anticipated devastation: another device for avoiding the full smack of your feelings.

Then, at some point along your path in life, some wise woman might tell you to “feel your feelings”.

So you decide to try that.

And when you do, you a taste the superpower of radically accepting everything about who you are, including how you feel and your experience of living this human life.

Maybe you even learn a little system for this radical acceptance, like the one that is taught by Tara Brock, and when you feel an unwanted feeling you take a sacred pause, and you note it, and you name it, and you investigate it with kindness and great self-compassion and you decline to identify yourself with the emotion but rather let it pass through you.

And at this stage, you might even realize that feeling your feelings allows for the expansion that always follows contraction in this Universe and in your inner world.

And that gets you ready for the mastery stage, in which you begin to do what my teacher David Richo so beautifully articulates when he says to greet your emotions not just with acceptance, but with “warmth” and even “hospitality”.

All of your emotions, even the really shitty feeling ones.

Then he says this: To allow your emotions to “have their career within you.”

Let that land for a minute.

Give your emotions — especially the unwanted ones  — the time, space and respect they need to course through you and do their work within you.

Let them do their job of clarifying what you deeply do and do not want in your life.

Let your emotions do their job of surfacing old, childhood wounds and abandonments that need acknowledging, grieving and letting go so that you can go free.

Let your anger do its work of awakening you to boundaries violated.

And let your all-encompassing, overwhelming, disproportionate emotional reactions to things that are happening today be your detector of the ancient voids within you that are only fillable by Divine love, so you can stop looking for love in all the wrong places, open your heart to Divine Love and use person you encounter as an excuse to flow that perfect, Divine Love all over and into.

Let your emotions do their work of awakening from old, broken blueprints you’ve allowed to become the stories that are living you.

And let them do their work of cleansing and energizing you, requiring you to rest for a time in the limitless love that formed all worlds and knows and loves every hair on your head.

Allow your emotions to do their work within you and those most dreaded, most unwanted feelings will come to an end.

Because you’ve allowed their purpose to be fulfilled.

But before they end, they spark an alchemy of crystalline focus, and clarity, and joy, as they end their career and return you wholer than you ever been into the present moment, so you can begin to live new blueprints, new templates for relationships, and love, and creative fulfillment.

All week, I’ve been micro obsessed with this poem from Rilke’s Book of Hours:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

In the mastery stage of emotional maturity, you may even realize that the brilliant Rilke needed a tiny edit when he wrote to let both beauty and terror happen to you.

Because your unwanted emotions — including and especially the universal terror of feeling unloved — they’re not actually happening to you.

They are happening for you.

They are happening to surface for you the folly and impossibility of looking for your mate or your achievements or your wealth to fill the void that only God-love can fill.

And it’s precisely when you learn to let beauty and terror happen for you and have their career within you that you realize their job is to bring you back to this limitless Divine love, which is already coursing through the center of your heart and is always available to you.

And then one day the emotions retire, their career ends, your tears dry. And they reveal whole edifices of Spirit and infrastructures of brilliance and topographies of joy and love within you.

And that, my friend, is what you do with unwanted emotions:

You let them have their career within you.

You let them do their job.

And then you let them retire.

Head up + heart out,