Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about why feeling our emotions is really key to our healing and growth. So most of us have this basic orientation towards our emotions that there's good and bad emotions. Good emotions are the things like happiness, excitement and calm. Bad emotions are things like fear, anger, sadness, or shame.

Now in our culture today, the idea is very strongly promoted that we shouldn't feel any of the bad emotions and that we shouldn't express them. And we should just be feeling all the good emotions all the time. Now, this idea is so strongly promoted that we often feel like there's something that's gone terribly wrong with us if we're not always happy. But the reality is is that there's no such thing really, as a bad emotion. Some emotions for sure are unpleasant.

That's true. And some emotions are more pleasant. That's true. But none of them are inherently bad or negative. In fact, all emotions serve a purpose.

They're like messengers. They hold valuable information about how to best navigate our lives. The more difficult feelings, actually like anger, regret or sadness, they actually often hold some of the most valuable information about where we need healing, where we might need to change our lives or where our boundaries or our values may not have been honored. So if we don't listen to our emotions, we may miss out on opportunities to live our values more fully, to heal our old wounds, to break free from old patterns of conditioning and to look after our wellbeing and grow mental strength. So most of us can feel a pretty strong urge to distract ourselves, push through, numb out difficult thoughts and emotions.

We may turn to numbing or escaping behaviors like shopping, emotional eating, scrolling the web, drinking, that kind of thing. When we do those behaviors continuously, they can be detrimental to our wellbeing. And also the reality is, what we resist persists. That is if we continuously avoid feeling our emotions, they will persist. In fact, the research shows that avoiding our emotions tends to prolong them and make them bigger.

Now, why would that be the case? Because they're trying to tell us something a lot of the time. There's a message we've not yet acknowledged or heard so it stays around. My invitation for today and ongoing is this. Try to see difficult emotions, not as bad or wrong, not as an enemy, but as an invitation to the parts of ourselves that are craving our attention. See them as opportunities for healing and growth.

A simple practice that you can try is to pause and become still when you feel any difficult or unpleasant emotion. And just ask yourself, if this emotion had a voice, what would it say? We can try a practice of this in today's meditation. So I invite you to now settle in for that. And as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us.