Have One Without The Other

I often hear people talk about opposite emotions and opposite reactions in life.  Often, people exclaim how wrong anger is or how they want to take away pain, or how they only have love.  While these are noble and honorable parts of life, I really don't agree that you can have one without the other.

After all, if there is not pain in life, could one experience pleasure?  If there was no anger in life, would we know what peace was?  If there was no hate, would we be able to identify love?  Could we be happy without knowing sadness or depression?

Maybe I'm being too simplistic, but in many ways if you you only have one side of the emotion, would you really recognize it?  I'm not so sure we would.  I believe it takes these other sides of life to bring about our awareness into what is possible.


In my own life and healing, I've experienced the deep pain, the anger, and all those things that many people claim are bad for us.  I could list many examples, but the negative emotions as people refer to them as, were just as much a part of my life as the positive emotions.  Without the negative, I don't know if I could easily recognize the positive.

One example from my own life was when I had just come out of the hospital suffering from a Conversion Disorder.  I was severely depressed but did not realize it. Finally when I started taking antidepressants, a few weeks later they began to kick in.  I still remember telling my doctor that something was wrong with me because I was feeling very strange.  When he asked me to describe what it was that I was experiencing, I was describing the emotion of being happy.  I had not felt happy since I was born and it was such a strange emotion to me.

If we are not careful, we can easily go through life thinking that we are only feeling one emotion or the other.  The universe needs to strike balance and by having both ends of the emotional spectrum, we have the yin and the yang.  We have a balancing effect by the two opposites.  It is necessary for us to find balance in our life.

With all of this stated, I'm not saying you have to stay in pain or anger or depression or any other state of emotion for all your life.  Sometimes we experience these moments and then we move into the more positive side of the vibration.  It doesn't mean something is wrong with us or were not good enough or were not being all we can be.  It just means that this is our state at this time and there is something behind it.

The more important lesson I believe is to allow ourselves to be at one with whatever emotional state we are in.  The more we accept it, the more power we have over it, which allows us to let go.  When we can let go, we then can fill our life with so much more.  If we chastise ourselves for having depression, feeling angry, or having pain, then we are limiting all that we will know in that moment.

Difficulties come into our life to help us learn and show us more than we know.  Yes, it would be nice to believe that we can have a carefree life, but even a plant needs some stress and tension to stand tall in the daily winds.  These moments of one emotion or the opposite emotion, help us find our boundaries in life and realize our strengths.  They help us become who we are and push us further in a greater consciousness for our life.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 12/29/14 by Don Shetterly

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