370. Feeling Through Art

Your sadness is so vague that you’re unable to express it until you hear a song that gives it a voice. Your rage is so incandescent that you cannot properly grasp it until you see a film that consolidates your emotion. You are so madly in love that you doubt the reality of your feelings until you read a poem that allows you to accept your joy. These are some of the many ways art helps you understand yourself.

Your emotions are strong and they push you around in myriad ways. It’s natural to have difficulty seeing what is real or true when this happens. Sometimes you have no reason why you feel a particular way. Something happened that brought a powerful feeling to the surface but you can’t understand what the emotion is or why it’s so intense.

Art helps you find the shape of your feelings. It helps to expand your awareness of your own experience, of what it is to be you. It can do this because your experiences are not wholly your own. Many aspects of them are shared by others and some of these others have found ways to express their experiences through art. By exploring their artworks, you explore their experiences and you gain a broader understanding of your own.

Art helps you see the roots of your feelings. It gives you a sense of their possible sources, which allows you to respond to them. Your many emotions drive you to take certain actions that feel in some way necessary to you. Art helps you understand the scope of that necessity — it shows you something more of what you must do and also what you must not do.

In this way, art refines your passions into compassion. It shows you how to respond to yourself and others in a way that arises from awareness rather than ignorance. It shows you that to reach joy again and again you must allow yourself to pursue those creative and compassionate actions that profoundly benefit you and the people around you.