When you start practicing self-love or gratitude, something unexpected often happens: grief, anger, or other “negative” emotions arise. This isn’t failure—it’s the healing process working.
“When you start loving and feeling gratitude, all the things that you don’t feel grateful for, that you don’t love come to the surface to get loved. It’s like if you were feeding fish, all of a sudden you feed one or two of them and all the fish show up at the pond surface to get fed.”
The Misunderstanding
People often think: “I was doing so well with my gratitude practice, and then grief showed up. What happened?”
What happened is that a part of them wanted to be loved too.
The Response That Works
“If you start loving it, everything changes. Instead of saying, ‘Oh, the grief is bad. I got to get rid of the grief,’ none of that is loving the grief. But if you start to love the grief, and you don’t resist it, everything will change.”
The grief isn’t interrupting the love—it’s responding to it. It showed up because love was present.
The Discovery
“You’ll start noticing that there’s even love in grief.”
When we stop resisting, we find that even our “negative” emotions contain what we were seeking.
Related Concepts
- Grief of self-abandonment
- Self-judgment is a defense against feeling emotions
- Loving something to make it go away stops working
- Moving the emotion dissolves depression
- Foreboding joy—fear of the other shoe dropping—blocks gratitude
- Self-blame is a way of holding onto what you’ve lost