Feel them all!
Today’s post is inspired by a convo I recently had with a dear friend of mine, and that is also a follow-up of my previous articles.
The emotions we have are infinite. There are as many as we want. Most humans usually feel the same throughout our lifetime, because we have been conditioned to do so. We all have “positive” and “negative” emotions inside of ourselves. I don’t like to use those words - hence the quotation marks - but for now, it will do.
In the convo, we were talking about romance. To be more specific, we talked about the validation that we, as humans, we are looking for, when we start committing to someone, or are about to. We spend more and more time with a person and we find we have common ground, projects, the same vision of the future, and we decide to get together to build something of significance with the other. Lullabies and butterflies, we both become vulnerable with one another, and things “get serious”. We have shed lots of stuff and we have gone a long way, but this relationship now triggers something deep inside of us: unworthiness, the fear to not be chosen or loved enough.
We panic, we start overextending ourselves for the other, to ensure we cover everything on our end, and we play the perfect partner who works their ass off on themselves and who invests a lot in the relationship. Nothing wrong with that. As long as this is genuinely planned as a stepping stone for the relationship we have with the other person, and not a cover-up for some lingering wound that we might not be chosen or unworthy of their love.
When we get back onto the dating world, we put into practice the awareness mindset we’ve developed over the years, but the past relationships we had might resurface, or should I say, the way we embodied ourselves in these relationships. And it’s ok. It’s ok to have these emotions, scarcity, fear, or feeling that we’ve spread ourselves too thin. But we forgot something. We are not the same person anymore, and this time, we are not gonna screw it up. And for the record, we never screwed it up. We did the best we could with our level of awareness at the time, and when reflecting back on our past, we should always pat ourselves on the back with compassion saying we’ve a good job.
Now it’s a different story. We are just gonna sit with our emotions. We are gonna sit with our loneliness if our loved one is not physically present with us yet, we are gonna sit with our feeling of unworthiness, we are gonna sit with our fear of not being chosen. Would we rather be chosen for someone we’re pretending to be, or for someone we are, with all our wonderful strengths and weaknesses? You see, when things get serious, we tend to catch up with this and our ego starts running the show again.
I could give here a thousand examples of why it’s impossible to be lonely, not chosen, unworthy; but it will not be registered if the emotions have not been felt, digested, and discarded by our body.
For people who rely on somebody to give meaning to their Life, it might trigger them to read the following, but we do not need anyone.
We navigate our boat, our Life, ourselves, from within. We do not need to search for validation on the outside. Let’s imagine for a second, that I tell my dog that he is unworthy. Do you think it’s possible? Do you think a dog has the capacity to be worthy, or not worthy? A dog is just being, and when we choose him, we did not ask him to be a good boy to earn worthiness points. Even when he is not a good boy, he is worthy. He just is.
Gambling our worth with a romantic partner, giving them the key to our worthiness or validation, is a game we’re playing only with ourselves. For how long?
When we feel a negative emotion, we tend to either ignore it, hide from it, or pile up a bunch of stuff on it to pretend we’re busy with other things. The truth is, there is no positive or negative emotions. Everything we feel is just feedback from our soul, to show us the direction we need to work on in a case of discomfort, or to follow, in the case of peace.
There is nothing wrong with us, to feel that. It’s freaking painful to feel those emotions, because at the first place, we do not feel safe enough in our body to own our emotions and feelings. We’d rather hand them in to this new relationship, or to our friend, or our parents, or our social media. Please, validate me, tell me everything I don’t dare telling myself.
I remember a story my sister told me, that one day, they celebrated a big win at the office. She contributed a lot to this win, worked her ass off and navigated the politics with outstanding results. The entire staff was there, and her boss thanked her personally in front of everybody. She told me that she welcomed the compliments, but that her mind went “not enough”. There was a part of herself that was still craving the validation, despite the entire office clapping their hands and celebrating her. We’ll never be able to receive those things from them, if we don’t give it to us at the first place. Never.
Being worthy is just a human concept. There is no such thing as being worthy or not worthy. We are, so by definition, we are worthy of all the beauty in the world. When we feel lonely, the part of us that thinks we should not feel lonely is just our ego. Because it wants to control; it wants to control how we feel. Because we should feel happy, hyped and only feel stuff that feels good all the time. This is not the reality of the human experience. We’ve had the privilege to have this body to fully feel alive and to fully feel what it is to be ourselves, with our past, in this present, and with the future we imagine.
Something I’ve also noticed is that, once those emotions kick in and we get scared, the real reason of that might be that that we are afraid to experience happiness. The conditioning is so strong that we believe it’s too good to be true, to be grounded in our Truth, and so we give the power to someone or something else.
The ego creates stories about us, and we cannot do anything but trying to “solve the problem” by keeping our mind busy with stuff and looking for solutions outside ourselves. While in reality, feeling those feelings is the ultimate freedom bandage we can get.
When we let go of these feelings of wanting to control the “negative” emotions, we open ourselves up to that magic. We transcend the past and we merge onto a higher timeline, where we can strive by being honest and authentic with ourselves, and with others. When we feel whole and complete, we open ourselves up to the desires of our soul, to our greatest gifts, and once the curtain is lifted, there is no going back. I believe that our ego puts ourselves through pain and suffering, to just remember who we are at the first place: a being with infinite possibilities, and infinite paths that lead to happiness.
It’s time to make a deal with ourselves. It’s time to feel the whole thing. The loneliness, the unworthiness, the scarcity. All those guys are our friends, disguised as bad guys. They actually are a rite of passage to outgrow the old version of us that still clings onto the past, like a child would hide in his mommy’s skirts. This is a privilege of being human, to grow through all these stages and steps to move forward the greater version of happiness we can find in this lifetime.
With love and gratitude,
Caroline
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