How Heavy is Your Baggage?

Being comfortable with all the emotional baggage that you carried all those years is easier than putting it down and allowing vacancy, isn’t it?

Our emotional baggage across our life is getting heavier. We navigate to different destinations in our lives but we keep holding on to these heavy belongings that we carry everywhere. It could be a lost joy, delayed grief, depression, anger, someone you love so dearly that got away, dark thoughts, shame – and the list could go on and on.

I myself held and am still holding onto emotions that make me ambivalent. I’ve carried my bag and left without any trace and got away. I felt safe and calm but it wasn’t real, it was the illusion my mind made to adapt, similar to how real a mirage feels but when you get closer it disappears. I guess we keep our emotions locked in a box deep down inside because we think if we ignore them and carry them with us it’d be much easier than having to deal with all the pain that comes confronting them.

The 13th-century Persian poet, Jalal ad-Din Rumi, talked about emotions in his poem The Guest House and called this baggage “an unexpected visitor” and that we should “meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in”. To allow ourselves to feel and stay with these uncomfortable feelings is necessary in order to live fully and clear space for new ones. “Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond”, Rumi reminds us to be grateful and accept whatever we feel because it’s a message and guidance from God.

A psychology professor, Brett Ford, said: “acceptance involves not trying to change how we are feeling, but staying in touch with your feelings and taking them for what they are.”  We feel what we feel because this is who we are. We are human beings, and there’s no off switch for our feelings. Acknowledging the emotions and letting them flow through us without resisting is what will help loosen up the grip those emotions have on us. A quote that keeps resonating in my head from the TV series How I Met Your Mother, when the wife of the storyteller Ted says to him: “I don’t want you to be the guy who lives in his stories. Life only moves forward”.

Each one of us is on a different journey, but we all share the same thing, we all share suffering. We suffer in a different way. We carry different belongings, but we keep going because this is life, it doesn’t stop for a certain thing or a person. I am not saying it will be easy and yes it will take time and courage to push yourself and move forward. Indulging every single emotion is agonizing and intimidating, but this is it, this messiness is what makes us humans. But be careful not to cling to it and pack it up with you when you leave, so you can give a space for new feelings and energy to come along.