orrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”

—Rumi

Emotions are like the currents that run through the power cables of your energy system. Movement is desirable and emotions are nothing but pure movement.

When the mind becomes involved, it has the incredible ability to interfere with the natural flow of this movement. It will set up an emotion to loop over-and-over again by triggering a story to repeat.

I remember in grade school I had a habit of developing a boyish crush on some girl and then I would lament about how she did not love me. I’d go to the swing set in my backyard alone and cry for what seemed like hours. As soon as the story of how she did not love me lost steam, I replayed the story so I could begin crying again. That’s when I learned it was possible for me to keep myself disabled in an emotion for an indefinite period of time. Because if I ever “forgot” to feel this emotion I was addicted to (sadness) and found myself running around happy again (heaven forbid!), I would simply replay that story. Cause and effect.

At the Zen monastery, we had a young woman who came to train for a short while. Whenever she would sit down to meditate, she would soon begin to cry. And it would go on for most of the meditation. It continued to happen at every meditation. I remember the head monk sought guidance from our teacher on this situation. Because on the one hand, she could have been releasing emotions bottled up for years and this was her opportunity to complete the process. On the other hand, and this is what was revealed through her guidance appointment, she kept repeating the story that created the emotions. Eventually, she was asked to leave. She decided to choose suffering by indulging it. She chose to hold on instead of let go.

Infants and young children have shown me that emotions are extremely transient. It’s startling how quick a pure emotion will move through their system and then be released for the next one. This is why you’ll see a toddler stumble, fall, scream bloody murder (there wasn’t even any blood!) and then in the next moment jump up, run and laugh again. Ready for action. Like nothing ever happened.

To me, this is our natural state. To have the ability to reinvent our emotions, thoughts, and perceptions of life from moment to moment.

Sorrow, laughter, frustration, passion, boredom all pass and give wake to the next most interesting life experience available and waiting for us — if we allow them to.