Hello, and welcome back to Practicing Human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about why there are no wrong emotions.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so the other day, I made a post on social media that I wanted to elaborate on here, and the post was, there are no wrong emotions.

There is only self-judgment. There are no wrong emotions. There is only self-judgment.

See if you can decode that. There are no wrong emotions. There is only self-judgment.

My goal with this post was to highlight that our various emotional expression from sadness, to joy, gratitude, to boredom, to fear, that there is nothing inherently wrong with the arising of these experiences.

They're based on cause and effect conditions, and in the moment, we often can't control their arising.

We can do something about it once they do arise and change what we focus on, how we think all of that can influence it, and can also lay the foundation for how emotions express themselves later on.

But in the moment, the arising of an emotion is very much out of your control, and yet, when it does arise, we do tend to make especially the painful ones wrong.

What's wrong with me for feeling this? Why am I feeling this? And again, that inquiry can be useful at times.

But it's as if the emotion is wrong, that this is bad, and there's something wrong with us for feeling it.

And that can get into some really treacherous territory, because now we're at internal conflict, internal war, with something that is arising, that is mostly out of our control.

If we could berate ourselves into feeling better, I'd say, woohoo, let's do it, but yeah, it doesn't work that way.

And this fundamental, often subconscious idea that underlies that experience, which is like, I shouldn't be feeling this, there's something wrong with this feeling, does create a lot of extra stress and a lot of extra suffering.

And there's nothing inherently true with the thought of this is wrong, this is a wrong experience, or this is a wrong emotion.

And that's why I added that second piece, which is that there's no wrong emotions, there is only self-judgment.

It's the self-judgment that creates an narrative that this is a wrong emotion, this is a wrong experience.

And it could be a self-judgment grounded in past experiences, all these different ideas and stories that you have about, who you should be, what you should feel, how you felt in the past, whatever, but it's still a self-judgment, it's still a story in your mind, and it is not objectively true.

When we can let go of that, and let go of the idea that the arising that's here, the emotion that's here, is not fundamentally wrong.

And it said, just give it space to be here, to be seen, to be felt, to be known as the experience of this moment that's here.

Since it's already here, we make space for it, we show it some compassion, we acknowledge its presence, we don't have to like it, you can like it if you want, you don't have to.

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