Play with your Full Deck of Emotions

Determining how you feel about anything—any topic or situation—requires slowing your thought processes and dropping it in for examination… specifically, how your body feels about it. Like shuffling a deck of well-worn cards, the emotions are familiar—not just as an outward show, but as individual signals that can be identified and worked with, if you’ll take the time to feel into your body rather than control-shuffle.

You regularly deal with a set of emotions at the ready: your go-to, your usual hand you pull from. Your Morse, often used. But they’re running in the foreground—ready to spring into action, to be pulled from your hand and played in response to another’s emotional card they’ve just laid down.

Rather than throwing a card from your typical hand, pause. Feel in. See what is actually arising for you in this moment. Reach for your full deck—the cards you may not usually play. The emotions you may not have touched in years, perhaps because they are surrounded by, or remind you of, a painful incident… something long held and not fully addressed. Like an old wound best left alone.

But what if the mere act of examining, recognizing, and noticing these unseen cards—these parts of you held in confidence, even from yourself—is exactly what allows you to become whole?

Allow the cards to fall where they may.

Feel into each and every twinge or reaction before throwing it on the table. Appreciate all that has made you the “you” that you are: unique and complete.

Play with your full deck. See if you’ve been holding the winning hand all along—not to defeat anyone else, but to feel more fully, more freely.

It is cathartic.

And it is freeing.