These are our worst feelings

image from here.

When it comes to the dark emotions, we are all experienced sufferers: grief, despair, and fear are our human birthright as much as joy, wonder, and love.

There is no life without loss and therefore no life without grief. There is no life without vulnerability and therefore no life without fear.

These are our worst feelings, and they are part of every life. When I call them dark, I don’t mean that they are bad, unwholesome, or pathological. I mean that as a culture we have kept thesee emotions in the dark — shameful, secret, and unseen. As a result, we tend, for the most part, to shun them. But the emotions that we reject and suppress can become dark in an altogether different sense:

like a rich, fertile soil from which unexpected flowers can bloom.

-Miriam Greenspan, Healing Through the Dark Emotions