Learning to Work with Emotions
The idea of the “inner child” may sound simplistic, but it gestures toward something true about being human: our emotional life is often far less sophisticated than our thinking mind wants to understands. The intellect would rather manage, dismiss, or reinterpret emotion than feel it directly. But like any child, our emotional world doesn’t grow through suppression—it responds to being seen, accepted, and guided with care.
When people hear the word emotion, you can practically watch them contract. Some get sad, some start overthinking, some feel perplexed, as if feeling were a foreign language. I have a brilliant tech-minded friend who looks at emotions the way I would look at a confusing line of code—she identifies so strongly with her mind that her feelings get overridden. But when we ignore or exile what’s happening inside, our “inner child” doesn’t disappear; it acts out in subtle or hidden ways. We go on pretending we’re sunning on some Malibu beach while a storm is quietly raging in the background.
Although sunshine seems appealing, humans cannot live by beach alone. And those that do, find ways to challenge the beach, such as surfing, deep sea exploration or operating a cabana. But the most successful surfers have real love, acceptance and understanding of the waves. This deep connection is not intellectual, it a felt sense. One doesn’t think their way through riding a wave. That would be a sure way to crash. As the song goes’ “ya gotta feel it.” Maybe when our emotional state crashes it’s because we are thinking rather than feeling our feelings.
Working with emotions doesn’t require a degree. Emotions don’t need to be traced back to their original parents before we’re allowed to meet them. Therapy can be valuable for history and context, but meditation begins in the immediacy of now: What am I feeling? Can I acknowledge it? Can I allow it? The practice is less about solving and more about connecting.
One skillful way of doing this is the RAIN process: Recognize, Accept, Investigate, Nurture, which naturally leads to non-identification. Recognition is like taking a snapshot—you see the child as they are in this moment without insisting they be otherwise. Acceptance is the simple bravery of letting the experience exist without making it bigger or smaller than it is. In loving-kindness practice, this is like the first soft smile before compassion opens.
After being seen and accepted we can investigate. Meditators do this by looking into their present experience. Not with analysis, but with curiosity, with feel, just as an improvisational jazz player feels their way through music. Trungpa Rinpoche spoke of “feeling the feeling” fully, letting it be absorbed and digested until it becomes nourishment rather than poison. If we attempt to push our feelings away, or cling to them with tight identification, emotions are prone to the poisonous. The nurturing in RAIN isn’t coddling—it’s intimacy. When we let the energy of a feeling move through without argument, we can allow it t nurture and enrich us. And we don’t need to keep identifying once it passes. There was anger and now it’s gone. Suzuki, Roshi said his anger was like a comet scorching across an otherwise open sky.
Emotions rarely respond to logic. Reasoning with fear is like telling a frightened child there are no monsters, or instructing a dog to let go of a stick because it has no nutritional value. The wise parent doesn’t exile the child for being afraid—they hold, guide, and stay present. At different moments the child may need a hug, a boundary, or a quiet “back to bed now.” But always, the foundation is relationship, not rejection. The parent understands the point of the family are it children. But the children don’t need to burden of making decisions for the family. The wise parent knows that the child, despite its protestations, needs to be guided.
Tara Brach calls our emotional inner terrain “the muddy middle”—the space between the narrative-making mind and the body where feelings actually live. We identify with thought, but emotion often starts and storms in the body. The mind scrambles to define and control what it hasn’t yet acknowledged. Artists understood this long before psychologists named it. Freud and Jung began to map the inner world, but it was people like Artaud, Picasso, and Francis Bacon who refused to squeeze feeling into rational shapes. They gave form to what can’t be neatly explained.
Feeling is not a problem to be fixed or a possession to defend. Emotions arise, move, and dissolve when they are not clung to or condemned. When we acknowledge, accept, investigate, and nurture them, identification loosens on its own. Then we’re no longer saying my anger, my fear—we’re simply noticing, there is fear, there is anger, there is grief. This quiet shift is the beginning of freedom.
Feeling our feelings is not indulgence—it’s our birthright, and perhaps the central labor of being human. When we stop treating our inner life as an interruption and start relating to it with courage and kindness, our emotions mature. And so do we.
- The image in the post is of a Tibetan Buddhist deity called Dorje Trollo who is the embodiment of compassion in the form of liberated passion and anger. Once released of constraint, emotions can become a liberated a force for deeper understanding of the art f being human.
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