Sadly, we don’t always trust our emotions

Emotions are critical messages from our soul. We ignore them at our peril.

In Western culture we have a history of treating emotions with suspicion and contempt, as somethign alien, other, separate from us. From Plato onwards the ‘passions’ have be viewed as our ‘lower nature.’ Regarding the source of the passions, as Freud did, as an ‘it’ (id), ‘a primitive chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement’, makes it hard to develop a friendly relationship with emotions or accept them as part of ourselves. This view of emotion as primitive and alien is a classic form of dualistic Western thinking.
As a result of regarding emotions as other, we feel the need to rid ourselves of these alien forces invading our system, either by acting them out or suppressing them. Yet this fear of our emotions indicates how alienated we are from ourselves. First we are alienated from our own energy, making it other and judging it negatively. Then we start to imagine…