The more we witness our emotional reactions and understand how they work, the easier it is to refrain.

The big reason for not repressing feelings is that emotional withdrawal causes us to lose our positive feelings. We lose the ability to feel. Sometimes, this may be a welcome relief if the pain becomes too great or too constant, but this is not a good plan for living. We may shut down our deep needs — our need to love and be loved — when we shut down our emotions. We may lose our ability to enjoy sex, the human touch. We lose the ability to feel close to people, otherwise known as intimacy. We lose our capacity to enjoy the pleasant things in life.

The question is, are we using our emotions to entangle ourselves or to liberate ourselves?

Once we are honest about our feelings, we can invite ourselves to consider alternative modes of viewing our pain and can see that releasing our grip on anger and resentment can actually be an act of self-compassion.

Being aware of how you’re holding yourself back with your self-talk and spending some time to get to the source of these beliefs is extremely liberating, because once you’re aware, you can begin to realize that these aren’t facts about you, but rather opinions. And there’s a very good chance that those opinions are wrong.

Take any emotion — love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions — if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them — you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.

"When emotional energy comes our way, we feel it. We take a few moments, acknowledge the sensation, and move on to the next step. We don't censor. We don't block. We don't run from. We don't tell ourselves, "Don't feel that. Something must be wrong with me." We don't pass judgment on ourselves for our feelings. We experience them. We allow the energy to pass through our bodies, we accept it as being our emotional energy, our feeling, We say, "Okay." Next we do that mystical thing so many people refer to as "dealing with our feelings." We appropriately respond to our emotion. We examine thoughts that go along with it, and we accept them without repression or censorship."

Feelings that have been pushed away do not actually disappear; they live on in the darkness of the Unconscious, pulling the strings in our relationships, our work, self-expression, causing us to become reactive, compulsive, obsessive, depressed, anxious, and deteriorate our physical health until one day, we remember, all feelings have a right to exist in us. So, we stop numbing ourselves, and feed them love, attention, curiosity and Presence. Now, they can finally come to rest.

Keeping your emotions all locked up is something that’s unfair to you. When you clearly know how you feel. You should say it.

Even if past emotions roar as they are released, we do not need to roar back.

In those moments when we realize how much we cannot control, we can learn to let go.

If we can relax when our strong emotions come, then we don’t pass fear on to our children and to future generations.

we do not discover the wisdom of our feelings because we do not let them complete their work; we try to suppress them or discharge them in premature action, not realizing that they are a process of creation which, like birth, begins as a pain and turns into a child.

If you hold back on the emotions — if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them — you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.