Streams of Emotion

The mind is everything. What we think, we become.       Buddha

     I was sitting in the park one day, not too long ago, watching the stream go by. It was spring and the water was very high. It reminded me of my own emotions which were running high that day too. I was hoping that, as it had been in the past, Nature would provide me with the answer. And She did.
        I noticed the pattern of the flow in the water and made note of the riverbed that channeled it. Emotion is like the water in that way. I understood that the emotions that were flowing through me we channeled through my thoughts and my perceptions, my beliefs and my fears, and it was that which held them in the stream that I was experiencing. But that was my choice and I could choose to change it. I immediately felt better but I was left with so many questions.
     How do we experience life without these perceptions from the past that make up the riverbed of our emotion? My mind wandered for a moment and my eyes came to rest on a whirlpool in the stream. There was the place to start. The biggest source of pain for me was the whirlpools of emotion, vortexes of thought, in which I got stuck.I knew that the whirlpools were a result of my underlying beliefs, but the riverbed changes slowly and I wanted an answer now.
     After several hours of contemplation, and many wonderful revelations, I realized the river just flows. In all the time I sat there, the river was the same but, at the same time, always different. The whirlpools came and went and the water ran before me ever-changing. I knew that to hold on to my fear or my anger or my pain was just unnatural and the answer was simply "Let it go".
     To avoid negative emotion is impossible but we can allow it as opposed to resist it. We can understand it, learn from it and let it go when the time is right.  All things in this universe change and flow, always moving forward in an endless stream of energy. The emotion we experience is just energy. We judge it, good or bad, try to avoid it, seek to control it but life marches forward on its own, with or without our help! When we can learn to flow with life we get a sense of peace, knowing and security that nothing else can provide. And that is because it is our natural way of being.