My account of overpowering emotion, and how it helped to think myself out of it.

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I literally couldn’t hear the music for more moments than usual this week, and that stopped me from dancing. There were times I wanted to book a flight to get away (from what) or get out (of where) . It was not natural, to say the least. Feeling like that is not natural. Yes, we have ups and downs, but, that was just savage. The weird thing was that wanting to escape was ridiculous, even as I felt it, because I knew no matter where I went or what I did, the feeling originated in my mind, it was with me, all the time. How do you escape from you? Even though external factors are catalysts…It comes down to you. And you can’t always choose to be happy, sorry. Sometimes you really do want to punch a wall, scream at those closest to you and shrink and withdraw. And you know you’re not being yourself.

Let me first just have you know that I am a believer and practitioner of meditation and yoga. I use these as tools for productivity, focus and balance. To add to this, I am quite the thinker, and sometimes my intellect gets me into deeper waters, whilst other times, it gets me out of a situation. Thinking is risky (when you’re me), but it’s my best friend and I can’t stay away from it! So this post is not to discredit the very real mechanisms I’d advocate to deal with life, but rather to share how I literally THOUGHT myself out of my crappy moments this past week.

I really do think time and space have a lot to do with recovering from ‘not being yourself’, whether its a moment, a day or a week. As in, moments go by and you literally cannot go on feeling like that, even though the situation hadn’t changed. You have. Time did. As in, space is so much more than its elements, vibrations, pulls if natural forces, we don’t even see these things! And did you know that true sadness can’t last without any happiness whatsoever, for longer than 2 or 3 days? Yet we can place so much importance on our fleeting emotions and become consumed by them. Sometimes even a moment is too much!

But let me tell you, the calm after the storm is a real thing.  It happens time and time again, almost as if to remind us tangibly that everything passes, everything is changing and you are a bundle of feelings and thoughts in the most gross sense. Actually, when we emerge from that and see that those feelings are not what we are and who we are, but a consequence, and an effect.

We are, in fact, solid, resilient, unchanging at the root, and truly beyond what the eye can see.

When you feel this, in your waking state, you really realise, wow, this is me. And all those times I felt void of that, it was not because there was no music. It was just because I couldn’t hear it. And so then, again, we begin to dance, till our bodies are tired.

And when we’re tired we’ll have to be reminded again, that we are actually not this, and that the fatigue is superficial, and that “I am that which does not tire”. It’s easy to say, but really an incredible feeling when it does appear.

So then, we dance again, until every single moment becomes a dance.