honeypig

Wama, the feelings you have are the feelings you have. There is no set of rules for what you "should" be feeling or how strong that feeling is allowed to be. In my experience, the best thing to do is to feel each feeling as fully as you can. The following line is from Oriah Mountain Dreamer's poem "The Invitation":

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.

(link to full poem here if you're interested: Poetry - Oriah Mountain Dreamer - The Invitation - It doesn't interest me what you do for a living)

I had seen the poem many times over the course of my life, but I never understood those words until I came to SR and started working through into my own recovery. Like dandy, there were times where I thought I couldn't live through the pain, but truly, the only way out of it is through it. If you "hide it or fade it or fix it", it'll just come back around some other time, dressed up in another way, and blindside you then.

One of the things that helps me when I feel overwhelmed by emotions, memories, or life in general is to do the "Mountain Meditation." You can find many versions of this online, both as audio/video and as a written script. The gist of it is to feel yourself sitting as a mountain, solid, grounded, immovable. All around you the wind blows, the sun shines, the rain or snow falls. All over your surface, the seasons change, plants grow and die, animals are born and die. But through it all, your essential self remains--calm, peaceful.

For me, picturing all those emotions as nothing but weather--strong storms that roar in the treetops but ultimately and eventually pass while leaving me still strong, solid and unchanged--was and still is very important.