let it flow: feeling as aliveness
In her book The Soul of Money, Lynne Twist compares money to water — a neutral force that can create life if allowed to flow freely, but poisonous and toxic if hoarded or stopped up. Where there is no water, there are deserts. Where there is too much stagnant water, there is disease.
Our emotional life is similar. Much like money, emotions can get a bad rep. Certain emotions are praised while others are shamed. There is a great deal of fear around our emotional lives — in a culture where emotionality is often deemed unprofessional, overwhelming, or immature, we learn early to keep the river dammed. We tell ourselves that if we actually allowed ourselves to feel, it would be like that dam breaking, destroying everything in its path.
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As someone who feels deeply and also learned young to process her big emotions alone, I know this feeling well. I have experienced days when sadness pools into a marsh, poisoning my outlook the longer it sits with no release. Other days, when no emotion would come at all — even when it needed to — the dryness left life feeling dull and muted.
But in the moments when I've had the courage to take a deep breath and then move — my fingers to write, my legs to dance, my mouth to finally say the thing — I find the flow again. The world becomes colorful and manageable, and I remember: feeling will not kill me. In fact, it will make me more alive.
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And this is true beyond my own experience. Our emotions, when hoarded or left stagnant, create disease — stored trauma, somatic tension, chronic numbness. When they flood one area unchecked, another goes dry. Grief that never moves becomes a wall. Anger with no outlet becomes a fog. Whenever there is a lack of movement, there is a problem.
But here's the thing. Biologically, emotions are simply a flow of electrical impulses between our body and our brain — a continuous, intelligent conversation happening in real time. They are not chaos. They are information. Anger often signals that a boundary has been crossed. Grief tells us something mattered. Fear alerts us to a perceived threat. They are a neutral force — like water, like money — designed to help us make meaning and respond to life as it actually is.
When we remove the shame and the fear and see our emotions for what they are — messengers, not enemies — we become empowered. And our emotions are finally free to do what they were always meant to do.
This is why at The Gathering School we define "feeling" as the "ability to allow our emotions to move through us and learn what they are trying to teach us" — or in other words, “emotional fluency” (from the Latin fluent-, meaning "flowing"). We want to help you become an expert in your own emotional language, because when you become ‘fluent’ in your internal world you not only learn how to communicate your experience but you know where your emotions want to move you. And this creates a life that is FULL— not perfect, but ALIVE, in all its myriad of colors. Much like a clean, ever-flowing river that makes the whole landscape bloom.