Feelings Are Like the Clouds in the Sky: Allow Them to Flow

“Emotions are like the clouds across the sky. They’re to be noticed, accepted, acknowledged and allowed to flow on.”

Stephen C. Paul, Illuminations

Life flows forward beautifully when we allow it. Important to the flow of life is the flow of emotions. Unfortunately, we humans tend to like to control both the flow of our emotions and the overall flow of life. Yes, we build lots of dams to block the natural flow of God’s plan for our individual lives and our collective life together as one people.

Most of our need to control life is subconscious and began when we were children. Many of us learned from adults that overflowing feelings were bad, and that we needed to build dams to hold the floodwaters of our emotions from spilling out onto others. I remember an evening when my mother was going through the family photo album. I was eight or nine years old. She was looking at a picture of my little brother. He was probably two years old in the picture and there was a little girl with him. I asked my mother who the girl was. She told me and then she explained that the little girl had died tragically shortly after the picture was taken.

The child was in her grandparents’ basement and she managed to get away from the adults who were with her. She wandered over near the furnace and her dress caught fire on the pilot light. As I looked at the picture of this beautiful little girl, my eyes welled-up with tears and I began to cry uncontrollably. I had never heard anything so cruel or sad in my entire young life. The crying was so uncontrollable that I believe now, much of it had to do with many other tragedies I had experienced and never allowed myself to grieve. And the crying greatly bothered my father. He insisted over and over that I stop, but I couldn’t

Finally, in utter frustration, my father said to me “If you will stop that crying, I will buy you a new model car.” I felt something tighten within my throat and chest. Exchanging tears for a new model car seemed like a great idea. Yet, the tears were still coming. I couldn’t immediately find the faucet handle inside of me to turn them off; but I eventually did. I dried my eyes and the next day I got my model car: A Ford Thunderbird.

This was my first great lesson in learning to control my feelings; to turn them on or off—mostly off—as I pleased. What I learned that day was that I could control my negative feelings through shopping. After that day, anytime I felt sad, I subconsciously looked to deaden my sadness through buying myself something. I believe this is where addictive acting-out begins. It’s all about controlling the bad feelings about ourselves and life. And we learn at a very young age that we can control them through some form of medication—alcohol, drugs, shopping, eating, gambling, TV, et al.

I was at a party recently where a three year old child tripped and fell. She hit the floor and immediately began crying. Almost as immediately, adults swarmed around her, comforted her with “don’t cry. You’re OK.” and handed her a cookie to “make it all better.” The verbal message the child received was it’s not OK to cry, to feel pain; and the physical message the child received was sugar will make everything better. Is it any wonder we have overweight children and adults in our society? So many of us have learned at an early age to medicate away our pain with sweets.

Instead of fighting, or medicating our feelings we need to allow them to flow naturally as God intended. Stephen C. Paul is right. Feelings are like the clouds. Clouds flow through the sky. They don’t linger for very long. And feelings do the same. Feelings arise for a needed purpose, and like the clouds, they need to be acknowledged, accepted and allowed to flow through us. Every feeling has its essential purpose. Feelings are neither good nor bad, but they are all necessary for our emotional well-being.

The next time we feel a storm brewing inside, let’s allow it to happen. There’s no internal tornado that’s going to destroy us. There are only important feelings that need to be properly experienced and released so that the sun can once again shine in our souls. Feel all of your feelings and allow your soul to shine!