the Wisdom Keepers

Most young children haven’t yet learnt to manage their emotions. They simply are.

When something is off, they cry, scream, reach — demanding that their needs are met. Their bodies speak honestly. Their truth moves straight through them.

As they get older, they become conditioned into “be a good girl/boy”, “behave in front of…” and “don’t make a fuss.”

Belonging:

And in many ways, this is essential. There is a code for living in society — a conformity code. It teaches us how to belong.

But conformity comes at a cost. Because with enough repetition, we start to trade our raw truth for what’s acceptable. We learn to edit ourselves. We learn to perform.

In fact, many of us become so adept at it, that we mostly live in our heads, not in our bodies. We behave as we should, not as we want to. And each time we override what we feel, we teach our authentic inner self that it cannot be trusted with emotion.

Performance:

That internal override button — the one that tells us to stay quiet, stay polite, stay palatable — stops us saying what we really think, feel, and most of all… what we need.

I don’t know that this is universal, but I sense it ripples through so many lives, in so many different forms. Somewhere along the way, many of us learn to deny, suppress, or block out the emotions that rise in us when they feel inconvenient.

We learn to hold it together. We perform. But what are emotions, really?

Have you ever paused to consider them?

Eckhart Tolle describes it like this: “Emotions arise at the place where the mind and the body meet. It is the body’s reaction to the mind.”

The body’s reaction to the mind.

Little chemical messengers moving through the system — creating sensation, signalling what needs attention.

Sensation:

Some feelings arrive as expansion: warmth, lightness, opening.

Others arrive as contraction: heaviness, tightness, a downward pull.

And yet, as a society, we’ve become quick to label emotions as good or bad. We judge ourselves — and each other — for having feelings we’ve been taught are “negative”, often because of the discomfort they bring.

But here is the thing: no emotion is good or bad. It simply is.

If emotions are energy moving in the body — e-motion — then they are life in motion. The meaning we attach to them is often the conditioned response… not the truth of the feeling itself.

True emotional intelligence, then, is the radical self-acceptance of all emotion.

To feel it. To listen. To allow it to move.

Not to be governed by it — but to be in relationship with it. To dance with it. To meet it with curiosity.

Because sometimes emotion rises as the inconvenient truth. The part of us that knows. The part we keep trying to ignore.

The most beautiful question isn’t “how do I get rid of what I’m feeling?”. It is “how do I meet it without abandoning myself?”

Suppression:

The cost of suppression is enormous. The World Health Organisation has described depression as the leading cause of disability worldwide, with a significant social and economic burden. And more, and more, we’re beginning to understand that treating emotional suffering matters as urgently as treating physical illness.

Physicians and trauma specialists like Gabor Maté have spoken widely about the links between chronic emotional suppression, chronic stress, and the way this can affect the body over time — including immune dysregulation and inflammation. There is still so much we are learning. But the body is not separate from the mind. And what we don’t feel doesn’t disappear… it goes somewhere.

And what is our most prominent response, culturally? Antidepressants. So many people I know are on them. This isn’t a judgement piece. This is a call to honour your body. To reclaim choice. To allow emotion to be met, rather than buried.

Layer upon layer, over years, they can build up and live in the body — The body keeps the score (Bessel van der Kolk). If you haven’t read the book, it’s a tough and honest read. Raw, confronting, and deeply convincing in its reminder that even the most painful experiences can shift when what has been locked inside is finally allowed to move.

Stories untold. Secrets. Suppressed experience. Burdens carried quietly.

My own experience of antidepressants years ago left me feeling nothing.

Sure — no pain. But also, no pleasure.

My world became black and white. I lost my drive, my stopping cues, and in many ways, myself. I couldn’t even achieve orgasm. I slept dreamless sleeps. I was, for all intents and purposes, a zombie.

I can understand how, for some, that might feel like relief. Even like safety.

But for me, it was a fate worse than living in colour with the darkness sometimes moving through it.

Looking back now, I feel it created a separation between my mind and my body. I was discombobulated. Unrooted and uninhabited.

And I knew the only way through it was to go through it.

Submission:

Therapy. A non-judgemental space. Held. Safe. Spacious enough for truth.

The first time I told my story, I lost myself in the pain. I drowned.

I remember the panic attacks. The grief. The fear. Thinking, will I ever feel normal again?

And when I finished sharing for the first time, my therapist asked me to tell her the story all over again. I couldn’t believe it. The cost had already been too much.

But she told me something I’ve never forgotten, that in the secrets, and in the silence, the shame holds the power.

And in the retelling, the story begins to lose its power.

So, I told her again. And again. And somewhere in that process, I can see now— the way I had learnt to “please”, even when in pain. The way I would ‘perform’ my healing, while dissociating from what I felt.

The emotions were too hard. Too sharp. Too much. I wasn’t ready and I believed the fear. That guttural fear — the kind that rises when you’re standing on the edge of a cliff, contemplating a jump. It feels alive. It feels ready to devour you.

No wonder the little pill is appealing.

The reality is that I bottled it. I pretended to be fine. I pretended to be better.

I know my therapist wasn’t convinced, but I had done all I was ready for. And real life demanded me back — being a wife, a mother, a friend, a colleague. I had opened the door to my healing, but I wasn’t ready to truly walk the path all the way through.

It took another four years before my body finally forced me into submission.

Wholeness:

I was utterly burnt out from work. The cost of people-pleasing, perfectionism, striving every day, suppressing my emotions and desires… finally won.

I had lost. I couldn’t hold it together anymore.

I went to the doctor who suggested antidepressants, as I was “clearly depressed” according to the signs and symptoms chart.

But every part of my body screamed no. I told her I didn’t need numbing — I needed to stop. To rest. To move my body. To sleep.

After eight weeks and two appointments, her suggestions became more forceful. Still, I held to my truth. I honoured my body. And I returned to therapy — this time with someone new. A different lens.

She listened as I told my now well-crafted story. But she noticed something that I couldn’t see.

That when I got to the hard parts, I sped up. My body language shifted. My breath changed. And I dissociated.

She challenged me to slow down. To breathe into the emotion that came. To trust my body.

To let the feelings move through me — without fleeing.

Without doubt, these were some of the most profound moments of my life.

I began to understand that I had compartmentalised my existence. I was a disintegrated person — functional, highly capable, outwardly successful… but not whole.

This began a year of intense work.

Learning to meet emotion instead of overriding it. Learning to name it, to feel it, to understand its contours — what it needed from me, what it came to protect, what it was ready to release.

Slowly, I became whole. I developed an inner compassionate voice that could finally soften the inner critic that had plagued me for years. I began to see myself as worthy. As human. As enough. And I realised my vulnerability wasn’t weakness — it was power. A life force. A compass that guided me home.

And here I learnt the beauty of emotion. Here I learnt its language. Here I came to trust its wisdom. And something in me became free.

Because emotions were never the problem. They were never “too much”. They were never proof that I was broken. They were the wisdom keepers. The messengers I had been trained to silence. The parts of me that knew when something wasn’t right — and refused to let me live a half-life.

And that’s the invitation I’m offering here, to stop treating emotion like an enemy, and start meeting it like intelligence. To come back into the body. To come back into truth. To let feeling be what it has always been… life moving through you.

When you stop abandoning yourself, your emotions soften into guidance.

The truth is… I didn’t become free because I “fixed” my feelings. I became free because I learnt their language.

If you take nothing else from this, take this: your emotions are not a problem to solve.

They are intelligence. They are a signal. They are your truth. And yet, most of us were never taught how to hold them safely.

That’s what I want to explore here — slowly, honestly, and in a way that belongs to real life. Not perfection. Not performance. Just the brave work of becoming whole.

This is where we begin.

@sacredsoulhood