MIRAI CODE · Feelings Are Not the Enemy
To You Who Keep Bottling Up Your Anxiety and Anger
Your hardest feelings were never the enemy — they're messengers from your own heart.
Mirai — a Future Decoder who reads the sounds of your name
"I shouldn't be feeling this way."
"I hate myself when I get this irritable."
The feelings that rise up inside you — do you quietly press a lid down over them, and pretend they were never there?
In my readings, I meet so many people who — trying so hard to be "a good person" — have pushed their darker feelings down for so long that, somewhere along the way, they've lost all track of what they truly feel.
— And I, too, could not stop being "the good one."
Back when I was engaged. Every morning and every evening, I went to my fiancé's family home to cook the family's meals.
However cold the words that were thrown at me. However unkind the treatment. Because they were his parents — because I was "the fiancée" — I couldn't so much as voice a complaint. I had no choice but to swallow it all, in silence. (Anyone who has ached under a difficult family bond knows this feeling exactly, I think.)
But — the tears I held back would not simply disappear. The instant I stepped out through their front door, everything I had forced down broke loose, like a dam giving way. How many times I wept aloud against his chest.
That whole year — there was not one single day I did not cry.
Feelings grow the more you try to erase them
It is a strange thing: the more you push a feeling down, the larger it swells instead.
And negative feelings are not, in truth, the enemy. They are messengers, come straight from your heart, to show you what it is you hold dear.
Anger rose because there was a precious line you needed to protect. Anxiety came because there is something you long to keep safe. Every feeling, without exception, has its reason.
Feel them fully, and they flow away
Feelings, too, are an invisible vibration — a frequency. Press them down, and they stagnate within you. Let yourself feel them all the way through, and they move on, like river water, and are gone.
"Ah — I'm sad right now, aren't I." "I'm angry." Simply to acknowledge it, just like that, and the feeling begins, softly, to loosen its hold.
The sounds of your name reveal how you feel
The sounds of your name also carry the shape of how you, by your nature, move through emotion — whether you feel things keenly, or tend to store them up inside. Once you know your own tendency, you stop being swept away by your feelings, and learn instead to keep good company with them.
What I am really doing, in every reading
So whatever feeling someone confides to me, the first thing I do is receive it: "You're allowed to have that feeling."
There is no such thing as a good emotion or a bad one. And in the very moment a person is met — received, not denied — the heart grows suddenly, wonderfully light.
In the end
When a hard feeling rises in you, before you reach for the lid, try — gently — saying this to yourself:
"So this is what I'm feeling right now."
Give yourself permission to feel. From that moment, the feeling flows — and your heart, once again, grows light.