It was July. It was a Saturday, high 70’s. I left my house to go to the gym; nothing really out of the ordinary (a story for another time!). A bubble of happiness, a moment of contentment while feeling the potential of possibility, converged through my body at one time. What was this unknown sense of completeness? Something (what I would now call my Essential Self or Higher Self) told me, “This is joy. You have been surprised by joy.”
When emotions are not processed (felt from start to finish), they are stored in the body. Over time, as the emotions accumulate and tensions escalate within a body, you might have learned to turn to another substance or activity (or several) to alter the numbness for a moment while simultaneously ensuring that it would continue: drugs, alcohol, food, work, sex, shopping, reading, etc.
You might have noticed that I didn’t mention any emotion in particular. It is not just fear, anger, and sadness that are buried, but appreciation, hope, and joy as well. When you first start feeling your emotions, I am not going to kid you: it feels shitty. Once your mind realizes you are not going back to numbness and anxiousness, however, something strange and foreign emerges from the feeling fertilizer: a little hope, a moment of appreciation and. finally, a whisper of joy.
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