My Journey to Self Compassion #1: Emotional Reintegration

Hello my dear reader :)

I thought I would start a series on my personal journey to loving myself.

Self-love has transformed my life. Now, I get excited to turn a year older, because with each year, I've been loving myself more and more. As a result, each year the beauty of life touches me a bit more deeply. It is interesting how much easier it is to see beauty everywhere once you start to see beauty within yourself and your own life.

It wasn't always that way for me. There was a point in my life (late junior high and extending until first year of university) where I hated myself. Loathed my whole being. Every day, every hour, every minute, I wished I was someone different. I couldn't bear being in my own skin, in my situation, in my family. Life definitely wasn't fun during those years, and I reached the point of being borderline suicidal.

I have come a long way, and I still have far to go. One key that has accelerated my self-love is connecting with all parts of myself. Bringing buried facets of myself to the surface so I can acknowledge and accept them. I can't truly love my whole being if I pretend those parts don't exist and refuse to integrate them with my being. 

One major part of myself I have been neglecting is my emotional side. Growing up in an extremely practical Asian household, I was never taught to honor my emotions. Instead, feeling and displaying emotions, both positive and negative, were frowned upon. As such, I've always suppressed my emotional desires in favor of logic and reason. 

My family is also quite spiritual, with discussions (well, more like lectures) regarding Buddhism and Daoism almost every dinner time. Emotions were presented as 邪 (evil) presences that cloud us from enlightenment. As such, I've always thought achieving a higher spiritual state required the removal of emotions, and that feeling emotions reflected the failure of my ability to connect with a zen state. 

And as a result of that, I feel a certain degree of shame whenever emotions come up.
"I shouldn't be feeling anger right now. That's not right. I'm a lesser person because of this."
This typically leads me to suppress emotions through denial. Pretending that the negative emotions aren't there and that I'm actually feeling something else instead.
"I'm not mad. That's silly, we all know I'm a happy and emotionally healthy person."

While emotions can arise when we identify with our ego, their "removal" is not from suppressing them, but through acknowledging them and letting them in. Emotions gracefully depart once their message is delivered. 

Emotions are messengers with critical information from the subconscious. Not feeling emotions through suppressing them is akin to not answering the door when these messengers come knocking. Telling yourself they aren't there, or that you're supposed to feel something else, is nothing but a painful illusion. Emotions can never be fully suppressed. They will find a way to deliver their message, and the knocking manifests in increasingly piercing ways until the crucial message is received.

It is easy to deny access to the messengers. Many times, the messages are truths we don't want to hear. Things we are unwilling to face. The cruel fact is that facing these truths for a brief moment of sharp pain results in less overall suffering than carrying a perpetual burden of subconscious agony.


Emotions aren't evil. Emotional pain occurs for the same reason that physical pain does. Using jiujitsu to illustrate- when you feel a twinge in your shoulder, do you continue to train? For avid jiujitsu practitioners like myself, the answer is a surprising yes. The thought of stopping training is frightening, and it is so easy to tell myself that it is nothing serious, or that the pain isn't there, or that I can train through it with an aspirin. But the pain is there for a reason. Are we going to face it and honor it? Our body is crying out for help, and we need to give it the support it needs rather than charging on and hoping the pain isn't real.

It is the same for emotions. I'll use a personal story of my jealousy. When I met my second partner, who I'll label as Tuber, he established early on that I was the "rebound" and he constantly spoke of his previous partner, who I'll label as Allium.

I kept telling myself i am not a jealous person. I buried those feelings and didn't let them show. I favored my logical mind, and my logical mind told me that "you're going into this relationship knowing you're the rebound, so you have no right to be jealous". 

However, every time Tuber brought up Allium, it was a laceration to my emotional body, an affront to my self-worth. It stung. I hurted but I discounted those feelings. I refused to listen to their message, and continued in the relationship without bringing up these issues. Eventually, the underlying pain became too great, and the slightest trigger sent me into tears. I eventually flew into a tirade of bitterness and resentment at a provocation that would have been utterly benign in any other circumstance. If I had heeded the messages initially- that this situation was toxic for me, that I was worth more than this type of treatment, that he needed more time, that there wasn't enough space in his heart for me- the ending wouldn't have been so ugly and i wouldn't have had to carry so much pain.

Emotions are an integral voice at our decision-making table. Similar to the other voices we are familiar with, like our logic and intuition, our emotions just want the best for us. 

To end, I'll leave this beautiful poem:


"This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!...

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond."—Rumi
 

How do you treat your messengers?