While I have focused on gratitude and reframing negative experiences and emotions to positive ones… I have also been learning about the importance of acknowledging and allowing ‘negative states of feeling’. I have learned that when something happens that evokes a ‘negative feeling’ states the worst thing I can do is to suppress them or put them away or drown them in Netflix, wine or work. So now when an uncomfortable feeling is felt by me — I think about all how I should process it or them. I think about why I am feeling what I am feeling and notice what in that is making me feel afraid. It could be fear of abandonment, of being judged, of rejection, of betrayal. This acknowledging, allowing and feeling the negative emotional states and pushing through them, takes the energetic charge out of them. I brought this learning to awareness and practice this week as I equally experienced joy and suffering, triumph and disappointment, love and grief … and I came to know that these are all emotions that must be felt by all of us at various times in our journey.