I recently got an email from a lovely woman on my mailing list asking me about how to use creativity to work through negative emotions. Which is a completely fabulous question and one that I have thought about a great deal. My first response to that question is that I don’t believe that ANY emotions are inherently negative. Now I know why she used that particular word. It’s a common way that everyone talks and thinks about feelings. Over the years I have had to train myself to NOT use that word because it’s the one that my mind automatically goes to. But it’s a word that carries a lot of unconscious judgment with it. It creates a dichotomy of good and bad, right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable. And since as human beings we experience “negative” emotions on a regular basis it means that we are relegating at least half of our emotional life to the emotional dust bin. Certain emotions are painful, yes. Difficult, often. And not always what we WANT to be experiencing. But they are not intrinsically bad. The emotions themselves are not really the problem. All emotions and feelings are a source […]