By Gonny 
We often speak about emotions as if they belong in two boxes.
Positive ones we welcome.
Negative ones we try to fix, transcend, heal, or quietly/forced get rid of.
But what if that division is already the misunderstanding?
Take fear.
Fear has taught humanity how to survive in this dream of form.
You don’t jump off a ravine.
You pull a child away from a hot stove.
You slow down on a dangerous road.
You respect sharp knives, poison, steep mountain paths, open railway crossings.
Without fear, the human experience would be very short indeed.
Fear is not the enemy.
It is a signal within the dream, part of the learning curve of living in form.
And then there is anger.
Is it wrong to feel anger in the face of theft, violence, corruption, cruelty, abuse?
Is anger always something that must be corrected, or is it sometimes the mind’s way of recognizing that something is deeply misaligned?
Anger does not automatically mean attack.
Often it simply means: something here matters.
Sadness then.
Is grief negative, or is it love meeting loss within time?
Is sorrow a failure of spirituality, or is it the honest acknowledgment that something meaningful has changed on the level of experience?
And what about concern, worry, pain, illness?
Are these moral errors, or are they experiences arising in a body-mind navigating a world of limitations?
The Course does not ask us to deny experience. It asks us not to confuse experience with truth.
All emotions…pleasant or unpleasant…belong to the realm of experience.
They arise within perspective, and perspective always implies an “I,” a “you,” a “they,” a “we.”
Different angles through which the one Mind looks at itself.
From one angle, fear appears as caution. From another, as paralysis.
From one, anger appears as clarity. From another, as attack.
From one, sadness appears as depth. From another, as despair.
But they are still experiences.
What if we stopped labeling them as spiritual failures?
What if we began to see them as part of a vast exploration… :
The mind experiencing itself through countless viewpoints, each one called a human life?
If that is so, then every emotion becomes understandable, even when it is not helpful.
And every person becomes worthy of compassion, even when they are confused.
Judgment enters when we forget this.
We see a human being caught in fear, anger, grief, or pain, and we make it personal.
We say: they should know better.
As if knowing better automatically dissolves experience.
But experience does not disappear through judgment. It softens through understanding.
In the dream of separation, emotions are part of the curriculum.
They are not signs that something went wrong.
They are signs that something is being experienced from a different viewpoint…a different perspective. (We call it “life”)
The shift is not from “negative” to “positive.”
The shift is from condemnation to recognition.
From: this emotion should not be here ….to: this is being experienced,
can it be seen with kindness?
When we remember that every emotion arises within perspective, and every perspective belongs to the same Mind, condemnation loses its footing.
And something gentler becomes possible.
Not denial.
Not dramatization.
Just a quiet respect for the fact that being human, even in confusion, is still part of the way home.
With love and light,
G.