When I am confronted with difficult feelings, or any feelings really, my tendency is to try to figure out how they can serve as lessons, make me more aware, and help me grow as a human being. I guess you could say this is my way of keeping feelings at a safe distance and under the control of my mind.

Some people create distance from their feelings by strategizing—focusing on how to change and improve them, or how to hold onto good feelings and stop them from disappearing. Others manage feelings by turning them into a story and continually narrating or describing them to themselves and everyone else.

We are taught that we shouldn’t get too close to our feelings and certainly shouldn’t feel them in the flesh or inhabit them. We don’t want to experience suffering, so we keep our feelings a safe distance away through countless self-protective strategies.We believe that if we were to feel them directly, we might never come out on the other side.

But herein lies one of the greatest mysteries of life: Somehow, when we stop trying to change or manipulate our feelings and just experience the raw emotions directly (without any story to go with them), they tend to transform on their own. There is a natural process, a flow of grace that kicks in when we give ourselves permission to actually feel what we feel, without a narrative about what it all means or what to do with it.

Once experienced directly, felt in the body and heart, with no “middle mind,” my suffering loosened. Ironically, the feelings could then actually become my teachers (as I had previously hypothesized). This was a revelation—that the feelings could transform on their own, without my pursuit.

Through this practice, I discovered that I can surrender to life and don’t need to intently pursue internal change or vigilantly manage my experience to fit a desired outcome. When I took the risk to let my heart simply feel what it feels, I was able to experience a larger, more magical, and mysterious process at work. I got to experience grace, which moves things forward on its own, me included.

Had I not taken the leap, I would never have trusted the river of life that is pushing us onward, no matter how much our mind tries to convince us that we are in charge. What I learned through this practice is that it is safe to sync up with my experience, to get inside it. Then, there remains only one entity, one experience, and one self, rather than a separate experience that I am having and must control.

So, too, I discovered that my feelings know how and what they need to feel better. They know this better than I ever could. I can then relax and trust life, trust grace, trust the process of change itself—all of which is happening on its own.