…like your emotional piano. (h/t Carole King)
I am completely at your mercy, in your power to put your emotions inside me. Just hit one of my keys, and your emotion resonates through me like a bad hair day.
I am powerless. I have no emotions of my own, only those that you make me feel.
Strike one of my keys too much and I am not responsible for what your emotion does to me. You made me do it.
See what you made me do…
One of my counselors in such matters has advised me of this radical concept she embraces of "owning one's emotions". We all have emotions; they arise as naturally as gas bubbles arise from the muck at the bottom of a pond. As they arise they pass through the water of our being, coming to the clearest water at the top just as they pop and disappear into the air.
Ephemeral as they are, such bubbles can be large enough to disturb the water and dilute the clarity, and cause ripples across the serene pond of our consciousness. The world appears different seen through the ripples, and viewing the world through the lens of a bubble can utterly distort what we see.
The bubbles can be seen as messages from the fertile muck that lies at the bottom of all our ponds, the detritus of our lives, fermenting away out of sight.
It can be useful to examine these bubbles, as they are (for me) what arise in my pond and can perhaps tell me something about the muck down there that, muck that I must allow to settle to live in the clarity of the water at the surface of my pond, where I interface with the world.
The bubbles pass through, pop, and are gone. Mine, just as surely as my farts are mine. They are not me, they simply pass through me if I don't try to hold on to them. Sometimes I can learn something from them.
But ultimately they are my responsibility, those bubbles of emotion. They make me do something only if I so choose. Nobody else put them in there, and my pond endures. Bubbles don't rule my life, or make me do anything.
Most of the time, anyway. I do my best.
YMMV.