When Bronnie Ware took a job as a palliative care assistant nursing the dying through their final days she probably didn’t realise the experience was going to be such a transformative one. As she nursed them closer to their passing they often shared a phenomenal clarity of vision on life.
When she asked them about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. After hearing so many Bronnie compiled a book called the 5 Regrets of the Dying so that those of us still living could learn from the clarity and wisdom of those about to pass over.
One of the 5 most common was I wish that I had let myself be happier. As Bronnie said:
“This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.”
If happiness is a choice then why don’t we choose it more?
In my work with young people I see how life can bite hard and experiences in early life and throughout life can leave us feeling that we do not have any choice in how we feel. The imprint of early trauma can leave invisible scar tissue that is hard to heal. There is no getting away from it. We carry on as best we can, we survive. And in some instances we distract ourselves with addictions to anything that will change the way we feel and provide some pain relief.
Experiences in childhood and the schoolyard and the fact that many of our parents and elders are themselves scarred by life influence us in ways that we are unaware of and unconscious to. We do our best even if that brings us further away from experiencing more joy and happiness in our life.
I want to explore how more of us can pass on from this great life without the regret that we wished we had let ourselves be happier, while also embracing sadness and pain. In fact, embracing all emotion equally without identifying with any in particular is key to this. And most of all becoming more conscious of what we would like to feel and being able to access it within us.
The Primacy of Emotions
A fella called Silvan Tomkins made a major contribution to our understanding of human behavior by arguing for the primacy of emotions. He maintained that our emotions are forms of immediate experience with the world. They are expressed in our body before we are consciously aware of them. He distinguished nine innate emotions that every child is born with. Research has since supported his theory by showing that these nine emotional states are ‘pre-programmed’ in to our facial muscles. We need them for survival and every human being on the planet expresses these 9 emotions in a similar way facially.
They are:
Positive:
- Enjoyment/Joy
- Interest/Excitement
Neutral:
- Surprise/Startle
Negative:
- Anger/Rage
- Disgust
- Dissmell (reaction to bad smell)
- Distress/Anguish/Sadness
- Fear/Terror
- Shame/Humiliation
So this is my main point; It is natural to feel a wide spectrum of emotion right? We are ‘feeling’ beings and come in to this world hard-wired to feel a spectrum of emotions. As children we are encouraged to feel the positive emotions while very often discouraged from feeling the negative ones. And so we learn to repress certain emotions; the ‘bad’ ones. And in a roundabout way this actually hampers our ability to feel more joy and excitement in our lives. Because we lose touch with the ability we are born with to feel, to be aware of what we are feeling and have the ability to choose to change it. Because sadness and joy come through the same door – by feeling.
All of this is my opinion and you will agree or disagree, it doesn’t really matter too much but I maintain that, due to a matrix of factors including our narrow educational system and our indoctrination by a predominant religion that used shame and a teaching of being unworthy and not enough to maintain order, we have lost our ability to be emotionally agile and move through feeling each of the myriad of emotions we’re naturally built to feel as humans.
Accompanying this we lose the opportunity to become alchemists of our own emotional inner states, to transform emotions when we choose. I believe that until we reclaim our right to feel all things and become masters of our own emotions we will continue to leave life wishing we had let ourselves be happier.
In summary:
- If we were allowed to feel anger, rage, sadness, distress and fear as natural states we would have a greater potential to allow the healing of repressed emotions arising from painful experiences in childhood and in our pasts. Then joy and happiness can become choices rather than states that we wait for circumstances or the permission from ourselves and others to feel.
- We need to integrate emotional agility as a core educational subject from our first day at school so as to teach us how to hone our ability to be able to feel all emotions equally without getting stuck in the ‘negative’ emotions. Befriend all emotions as equals – but develop skill in how to move through emotion.