When Feeling Everything Leads to Wholeness

Do Pain and pleasure share the same doorway?

If someone had told me, years ago, to lean into emotional pain or discomfort, I would’ve looked at them like they were out of their mind.

Why would I willingly move toward sadness, anger, fear, or disappointment—emotions no one wants to feel?

So many of us are taught, quietly or directly, that “negative” emotions are signs of weakness. So, we learn to hide them, forcefully rise above them, or spiritualize them away. I think many of us become really good at being “fine,” and equally good at pretending we don’t feel what we feel.

Back then to me, the idea of leaning in felt like walking toward a fire. It felt scary, uncontrollable, overwhelming.

I didn’t want to face the sadness, the anger, the fear… the discomfort that comes with being fully human. But what I didn’t know then is that fire doesn’t consume us when we meet it with awareness. It transforms us.

And interestingly, the paradox is this:
What we avoid grows in the dark. What we turn toward begins to lose its power.

So I realized: emotions aren’t meant to be conquered or denied. They’re meant to be felt.

From my experience:

🌿Leaning into sadness did not make me more sad—it helped the sadness move.
🌿Leaning into anger did not make me explosive—it helped the anger reveal its message.
🌿Leaning into fear did not make me fragile—it helped me see where I was still holding myself back from life.

For so long, I thought joy came from rising above the hard emotions. But now I understand: joy comes from being whole.

And being whole means honoring the full, raw, human spectrum of everything that moves through the emotional body.

🍃

Kahlil Gibran captures this beautifully in The Prophet:

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.

 🙏