My parents are typical Italians. When something bothers them, they tell you and everyone else, loudly, openly, with no reservations. Mom talks often about honoring feelings; when I am upset or angry or jealous or floating on air in love she'll say - "Oh that's okay. That's how you feel," as if the feeling itself is a validation.
It's taken me this long in this lifetime to realize mom is right. I want the truth. I want to be honest. Inner feelings are a gauge, a signpost leading directly to what's real. When I think too much, intellectualize my emotions, deny them because they don't align to some external, fake standard I'm setting up in my mind, I deny myself and the life around me.
Honoring the self within is crucial to the creative process. Our feelings at their root are the golden sliver of inner truth that produces alchemy. They bring into being the magical nature within us that allows us to write, paint, sing, even occupy Wall Street, all in honor of our own being.
We are already perfectly designed to notice the anger, jealousy, attractions, especially attractions that will stir us, move us in the direction of creation, allowing us to be a centrifugal force, spinning, morphing, becoming ourselves.
Acknowledging feeling validates the true self. That is when the heart becomes an open book for channeling the eternal, the seat of connection to all being, the creative connections to the central, radiating, shifting, glistening truth that is our birthright.
Feelings are the seed of creativity. Thanks mom.
(The photograph is from the book signing for Bear Speaks. I am toasting with my dear yoga friend Max, my sister-in-law Bonnie Delight. That's Stephen Doherty playing the guitar in the background.)
