The Yin and Yang
of Emotional Intelligence
There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature,
the assurance that after night, dawn comes, and spring after winter.36
~rachel carson
In this chapter we explore how to work with the difficult emotions necessary for all aspects of climate resiliency. I present this material via the perennial, wisdom-rich metaphors of holistic medicine because this is the best eco-psychological model for comprehensive human-nature healing I know.
Difficult emotions arise as we engage with both climate crisis and our historical love wounds. As we’ve discovered, these inner and outer domains interface with each other. Embracing these states simultaneously helps us heal our hearts as well as the world. The emotions we need to reckon with climate breakdown and mobilize for climate action are the same emotions we encounter dealing with life’s many challenges and disappointments, including reckoning with our past love wounds. Wisdom for how to work with these emotions is also invaluable for cultivating and sharing our unique gifts with the planet and our loved ones. Embodying and skillfully working with sadness, anger, fear, remorse, despair, and other difficult emotions are therefore adaptive for coping and thriving on multiple fronts.
Ten Benefits of Difficult Emotions
Difficult emotions help us:
1. Heal through past and current trauma, including losses caused by climate change.
2. Rebirth our finer jewels of being human, such as compassion, empathy, creativity, and wisdom.
3. Overcome fear and denial (what I refer to as our fear-mark in the next chapter) to face difficult reality, including distressing climate change news and reports.
4. Better empathize, communicate, work cooperatively with one another, and resist business as usual.
5. Live more fully in the present moment.
6. Be more receptive to signals from our environment so we can extend a healing response.
7. Engage tough love and tend to what is ailing without turning away, thereby increasing our sense of oneness and our capacity to love when what we love is ailing. (If love is only a positive, feel-good experience, then we miss out on the experience of love when things fall apart.)
8. Cope and thrive with having less, producing less, and consuming less (minimalism and degrowth).
9. Lower our carbon footprints by allowing us to make peace with naturally cycling fallow times and not compulsively “progressing” and “succeeding” 24-7.
10. Live poetically and passionately so we can nourish ourselves with sustainable beauty and pleasures through thick and thin, thus precluding our need to purchase, plunder, and lump too many things onto our lives.
Our emotional intelligence toolbox also includes learning how to work with strong emotions without letting them totally derail us. This strategy is consistent with that of prevailing psychological wisdom for how to face and metabolize emotional pain by keeping one foot in difficulty (pain, trauma, and overwhelm) and one in resiliency (regulation, mindfulness, and nature/community connection). This approach respects both chaos (difficulty) and order (regulation), Yin and Yang respectively, in order to integrate what feels broken and unmanageable into a more beautifully complex and full-spectrum wholeness. With emotional intelligence we harness difficult emotions as fuel for care, activism, and building community.
Still, we often don’t have control over our emotions. We may encounter stints of overwhelm or lapse into extreme emotional states. I have personally found these intense forays valuable for moving fully through the depths of pain and being rebirthed into new levels of integration, even though they compromise my usual productivity.
Heartache from both personal or climate loss can transform us into people more richly connected to the rest of life. Each of us will have our own sensibility and tolerance for how deeply and how long we go into such healing crises, for which emotional intelligence tools are invaluable.
A Holistic Lens
Yin and Yang comprise the primary metaphorical design of Chinese medicine. The Five Elements—also called the Five Phases—are an extrapolation of Yin-Yang dynamics, represented in Figure 2 below. The Five Phases are Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. These phases refer both to the composition and forces of the natural world, as well as to human beings as expressions of nature. They therefore represent our total interconnection, our holistic entanglement, with the natural world.
I like to refer to the elements as “phases” because this speaks to their dynamic, transformational nature, as represented by the clockwise arrows in the schema above. This way, we can think of the Yin-Yang symbol and its Five Phases as verbs. The model of seasonal transformation (both in the outward seasons of the yearly cycle and via our human, psycho-spiritual “seasonal moods”) from one phase to the next is the essence of human-ecological regeneration and resilience in mind, body, and spirit in concert with the natural world.
According to Chinese medicine, each of the Five Phases corresponds with a season and an emotion. The Fire phase corresponds with summer and joy, Earth with late summer and worry, Metal with autumn and grief, Water with winter and fear, and Wood with spring and anger. The phases and their corresponding seasons and emotions are divided among Yin and Yang, in the spirit of balance. The Metal and Water phases pertain to Yin and decline, represented by the black paisley; the Wood and Fire phases pertain to Yang and growth, represented by the white paisley. The paisleys are depicted in miniature at the center of the image with their white (Yang) and black (Yin) halves corresponding with the seasons and emotions they represent (Figure 2). The Earth phase, representing our planet and Mother Nature, is considered a balance of Yin and Yang energies (Figure 3).
Figure 3: The Five Phases with Earth at center
Older pictograms of the Five Phases show Earth at the center, seen above in Figure 3. While Figure 2 differs from Figure 3, each highlights a distinct Yin-Yang dynamic. When Yin and Yang are in balance, the Earth between them that they mutually create is supported and thrives! The same is true for humans, and we must find this thriving in relation with the natural world, not in a human-centric bubble. This is why Yin-Yang and the Five Phases provide the quintessential model to understand and engage with emotional work to heal all aspects of ourselves in relationship with the natural world, including climate crisis.
Grief and fear correspond with the Yin seasons of autumn and winter and are therefore Yin emotions. Grief is a downward, sinking feeling, and fear contracts us. Downward and inward are both cardinal Yin attributes. Anger and joy, on the other hand, correspond with the Yang seasons of spring and summer and are therefore Yang emotions. Anger and joy are both upward and outward emotions; upward and outward are cardinal Yang characteristics. Yin-Yang and the Five Phases eloquently capture eco-human dynamics of interdependence and regeneration in a healing context. They are therefore a dynamic lens through which to understand not only human-nature dynamics but all our triangle of resilience relationships, to help us heal through climate crisis.
We can see the results of our Yin and Yang emotions in the world and in the dynamics of climate change. Our emotions are, in fact, nature’s passion coursing through us in all its varied expression. How we work with and employ emotion through our actions in turn affects the whole of nature. It’s no accident that we feel more joy in the warm ease of summer, more melancholy and sadness as leaves fall in autumn, more contraction and fear in the depths of winter, and more anger and frustration as we grow from the darkness of winter into the buds of spring. Nature’s signature is in us and in the more-than-human world; we are one.
Adaptive Hurt
As the primary drivers for our lives and the litmus test for our wellness, our emotions inherently join us with the natural world to ensure a sustainability of mutual wellness. When human culture becomes too solipsistic and anthropocentric, our emotional intelligence informs us of this imbalance via our difficult emotions. Because we are connected with the natural world, when it hurts, we hurt. This confers a survival advantage, as we’re prompted to heal what cries out for help. In contrast, denying painful emotions leads to an imbalance of the Five Phases inside us, eventually translating to disharmony outside us. Our sadness, anger, anxiety, and even feelings of hopelessness and depression—when skillfully worked with—can be sane, adaptive responses to climate distress. Our emotions alert us to the problem; how we respond is our choice, and this is where the rubber meets the road.
Minimizing unnecessary busyness and distraction to reduce unnecessary stress allows us to be more emotionally aware and integrated, both of which liberate time and energy for climate activism. These two undertakings—creating time and energy and mobilizing emotional work (inner activism)—are precisely the measures that have personally prepared me to engage in building community, climate rebellion, and eco-restoration efforts.
When we are stressed and distracted by everyday living, we can’t easily connect with our more vulnerable feelings of sadness, fear, and even anger in response to climate crisis. Assuring that we can harvest the holistic wisdom in difficult emotions—which resets our inner compass and rebuilds a bridge of connection with the living planet—is foundational for restoring our relationship with all aspects of the world we inhabit. This way, we are more able to notice and act when our relationship with the biosphere goes awry. Yin-Yang and the Five Phases therefore provide a radically sane medium for regenerating our triangle of resilience relationships.
Jung believed we are all whole within, but to actualize this potential we must make our unconscious conscious. Because Yin (the unconscious) and Yang (conscious awareness), along with their respective phases, represent our wholeness, incorporating and welcoming all the phases’ corresponding emotions of joy, sadness, pensiveness, fear, and anger into daily life is to live more fully and, ultimately, sustainably.
Emotional Flow
In the same way the yearly seasons flow into and support one another, so too do their associated emotions flow through us when we acknowledge and embrace them with skill and wisdom—with emotional intelligence. Experiencing all the phases’ associated emotions is essential to our being fully and compassionately human, and to our ability to extend compassion to the Earth. This could be another reason the Earth phase was originally placed at the center of the Five Phases, indicating its centrality to our well-being (see Figure 3).
Welcoming and skillfully engaging with our dark emotions ensures the smooth flow of vital energy, or Qi (Chi), as it is called in Chinese medicine. This flow is the transfer of energy and matter from one of the Five Phases to another along the wheel of Yin and Yang (see Figure 2). You can also think of Qi as the vital energy in all our emotions, as well as the wisdom released through our finer jewels when we work through the knots and sludge of our emotional pain. When our Qi flows—up through the Yang phases and down through the Yin phases of our lives—we find vitality in both joy and sorrow, and maintain a sane connection with our world.
At times, embodying our emotions might appear imbalanced. But as long as an emotion is allowed its season and is skillfully worked with, it can transform into more wisdom and wholeheartedness. When we consciously embody and allow our natural ups and downs, we join the cycle of the phases, as each emotional phase arises and gives way to the next. This constant transformational cycle—the verb of Yin-Yang and the Five Phases—can paradoxically impart a sense of stillness and effortlessness, especially when we genuinely accept tough times. We experience this cycle daily when we rise to be active (Yang) and then lie down to rest at night (Yin). We also experience it during and after creative flow states such as dancing, creating a poem, or trekking through the woods. All include tough and easy patches, as does any meaningful activity in life. Both effort (Yang) and surrender (Yin) are required.
To shed light on your personal Yin-Yang balance, reflect on the following Yin and Yang qualities. Elaborate on what you realize, and note where you could create more balance for yourself—not per societal norms or what you are “supposed to do,” but by what feels intuitively, somatically “right” or true for you.
• Do you feel that you are too mentally and physically active (Yang activities) and that you need more rest and relaxation (Yin activities)?
• Are you more comfortable feeling and expressing the Yang qualities of judgment, anger, and criticism than you are the Yin qualities of grief and compassion?
• Do you feel you spend too much time extroverted (Yang) as opposed to introverted (Yin), or vice versa?
• Are you able to patiently sit with difficult emotions (Yin), or do you feel a need to impulsively and immediately express and distract yourself from them (Yang)?
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While the cycle of the Five Phases is a fixed progression of the yearly cycle, this is not always the case in our emotional lives. Any emotion can arise in us at any time. Anger can turn to fear, then to grief, and then to joy. The progression of our emotions does not necessarily follow the Five Phase cycle of the seasons shown in Figure 2. The Five Phases simply represent a fullness of emotional experience and offer wisdom for how to embrace and balance all our emotions, in whatever season they may arise. We should not contrive our emotional lives to fit the literal cycle of the Five Phases. The lesson is to attune to the intimations of transformation, overall balance, inter-support, and wholeness amongst all the phases, and to note their influences and gifts throughout the seasons of our lives.
Because difficult emotions impart wisdom, tending to our shadow through emotional honesty—which is to consciously feel our true feelings—contributes to regenerative acts more than maniacal progress. Regenerative action, for example, is painfully absent among many of our current world leaders. It is common in those fighting for justice, who communicate well through thick and thin to build community, and work sustainably with the land.
Emotional balance means living in a functional, Yin-Yang dynamic of repose and action, reflection and expression, death and rebirth. My unique recipe for emotional intelligence, informed by holistic medical wisdom, includes the following ten ingredients:
49Ten Steps for Emotional Intelligence
1. Feel your true emotions and feelings (for this discussion, emotions are acute reactions to events, and feelings are how we feel in the longer term, after reflecting and integrating emotional experiences).
2. Know which emotions you are feeling. Name them.
3. Determine whether it’s appropriate to surrender to the emotion or to mitigate it (more on how to discern this in the forthcoming chapters on fear and anxiety).
4. Identify any helpful information an emotion has to share with you.
5. Discharge or express strong emotion in as nonviolent a way as possible.
6. When appropriate, feel and “be with” an emotion or feeling without immediately acting on or expressing it.
7. To the degree appropriate, allow yourself to be affected and changed by emotions and feelings, such as receiving the experience of grief without analyzing it.
8. Gradually process and integrate emotion by pacing yourself according to what you can handle (a process called “titration” discussed later in this chapter under “Titration and Healthy Denial”), and reach out for support when metabolizing overwhelming emotion and feelings.
9. Allow emotions and feelings to have their time and their season, and to pass on their own terms, coaxing and curbing them when appropriate (described shortly).
10. Reflect on the results: what worked well and what didn’t. Sometimes this takes a while to reveal itself and requires patience.
• Exercise •
Emotional Intelligence Reflection
Reflect or journal on the following questions for each of the Ten Steps for Emotional Intelligence:
1. What is your opinion of each of the steps, and which do you find valuable?
2. How much do you already practice each step, and in what specific ways can you increase practicing any that you feel to be helpful?
3. Recall a recent challenging emotional experience. Review each of the Ten Steps above and list those you applied to the situation. Also, identify which ones you didn’t apply and consider how each of these might have saved you unnecessary suffering.
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Treating the world with care relies on emotional intelligence. We pause long enough in self-reflection to generate sufficient wisdom to act with integrity for ourselves and for the whole. Creating a sustainable outer world from solid emotional work and clear thinking (Resource 2: Weber, “Re-thinking”) provides enduring security for equitable prosperity—more compassion and equality for all. This allows for more inner growth, which in turn leads to a more enjoyable and fruitful outer life. A fertile, positive feedback loop is created.
Since positive feedback loops will be discussed throughout this writing, I want to briefly define the term. A positive feedback loop occurs when a given condition A amplifies condition B, which in turn amplifies condition A, thus amplifying condition B anew, on and on in an exponentially intensifying cycle. Some positive feedback loops create beneficial (fertile) results; others lead to disaster.
An example of a beneficial positive feedback loop is the example just mentioned: inner work (condition A) influences our actions to benefit others (condition B), which in turn supports our inner life (condition A), which creates even more benefit to others (condition B). In contrast, the wildfires that began in Australia in late 2019 are an example of a disastrous positive feedback loop. These wildfires were fueled by climate change (condition B), yet the fires themselves (condition A) exacerbate climate change (condition B), which in turn amplify the incidence of wildfires (condition A).37 Healing climate crisis requires we create regenerative positive feedback loops between ourselves and the natural world, and that we desist from Earth-destroying ones.
When either Yin or Yang is deficient (underrepresented), a distorted manifestation of the other results. Too little Yin creates a relative excess of Yang, and vice versa. On a physiological level, if we are deficient in Yin hormones, vital fluids, and sleep, we tend to develop what Chinese medicine calls Yin-deficient heat signs. This often manifests as headache, night sweats, temporary flushing, and restless irritability. If we are deficient in Yang hormones, metabolic energy, and physical activity, we tend to develop Yang-deficient cold signs such as chills, low appetite, weight gain, lethargy, and depressed mood. On an emotional level, denying (Yang) joy leads to (Yin) despair and apathy. Too much (Yang) anger and not enough (Yin) grief leads to excess (Yang) violence and destruction. Further, symptoms of Yin and Yang excess and deficiency create infertile (inappropriately destructive) positive feedback loops leading to more imbalance, which is why it’s important to address them sooner than later.
In sum, we see how the interdependence of Yin and Yang can work for or against fertility and renewal. Inner, positive feedback loops of physiological dysregulation and emotional denial can render us less capable of caring for the world, leading to destructive positive feedback loops in the body and in the environment. These proverbial chickens of biospheric imbalance come home to roost, dysregulating us even further and creating a larger, novel feedback loop of destruction and violence between humans and the environment. In contrast, by following Yin-Yang wisdom and welcoming all its seasons to the guesthouse of our hearts and minds, we create a regenerative, positive feedback loop with the natural world. An embrace of all Yin and Yang emotions also helps us maintain harmonious, regenerative relationships with each other as we work through difficulties, celebrate goodness, and remain humble for the greater good.
Grief, Anger, and Integrative Activism
Because emotional intelligence contributes to our own and the natural world’s health, wisdom for how to work with emotions is part of holistic medicine. Yin-Yang emotional intelligence includes an equal appreciation of each of the cardinal emotions in the wheelhouse of the Five Phases as required to live regeneratively within a balance of death and rebirth for ultimate flourishing. What’s more, each emotion serves to keep other emotions informed and in check, similarly to how the light of awareness keeps in check and informs us of our unconscious psychological shadow in order to curb our malevolent urges and perverse progress. This checks-and-balances system is known as the Control Cycle in Chinese medicine. It helps integrate the phases by guiding medical treatment and harmonizing our psyches, the very qualities we need to cope through and heal climate crisis at its root.
Figure 4: The Five Phases and Their Correspondences
The Control Cycle is depicted by the inner arrows, in the form of a star, among the phases, as seen above in Figure 4. Yin’s grief and Yang’s anger, for example—pertaining to the Metal and Wood phases, respectively—must exist in dynamic balance. As you can see, these emotions lie on either end of the arrow extending from the Metal to the Wood phase. A significant excess of either of these emotions, when consciously or unconsciously used to avoid the other, creates enduring imbalance and throws off the smooth flow of the other, disrupting harmony inside, and eventually outside, of us.
In contrast with the Control Cycle, the Generation Cycle is depicted by the outer arrows in Figure 4, indicating a healthy flow of transformation from one phase to the next in a clockwise direction, similar to the flow of the seasons of the year. The Control Cycle imparts a Yin, restraining effect on our lives, while the Generation Cycle imparts a Yang, procreative effect. This Yin-Yang balance is key to sustainable living, as we both curb and progress in all ways.
In Section I, we learned some of grief’s benefits. Grief’s cardinal function is to keep fertile darkness—namely our emotional pain—moving and transforming. For this, all we need to do is feel our grief—to mourn. But grief, and grief work, are not just about expressing sadness and “dying through our pain” like this. They include feeling and expressing anger; after all, anger is one of the five stages of grief. We can feel sadness and anger for what we’ve lost and in response to what has hurt us, including ecological or interpersonal losses and injuries.
Another often overlooked, valid form of expressing anger is sitting with anger, neither repressing nor directing it outwardly. This way, anger expresses itself inside us, as it simmers and “boils off,” allowing for a more gradual, measured release. If we find our anger is festering more than simmering and diffusing, we might not choose to express it appropriately and safely. Noticing this dynamic and sensing how to express anger is an example of emotional intelligence. So is noticing the results of doing so.
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Let’s explore in more detail how grief interacts dynamically in relation to its Yang brother on the other side of the Yin-Yang spectrum: anger. When we can’t feel and process (Yin) grief, the resulting buildup of backlogged pain often propels us to lash out inappropriately in (Yang) anger. This dynamic is represented by the diagonal arrow from Metal to Wood becoming weak (Figure 4), resulting in a lack of healthy restraint on the Wood phase and its associated emotion of anger. This lack of “control” (read: healthy check) on the Wood phase allows its corresponding emotion of anger to grow unrestrained.
The holistic model of the phases and their correspondences shows how energy manifests through any of the correspondences. Grief and autumn correspond with degrowth, while spring and its creativity correspond with growth. Thus, an inability to grieve leads to unregulated growth of all kinds. Dysregulated (extreme or misplaced) anger combined with a failure to grieve correlates with greed and pernicious outward growth, as we observe in out-of-control industrial production and consumption. This is an example of how our collective emotional imbalance creates social and environmental imbalance.
Similar damage occurs in reverse. If we can’t feel and express healthy anger, it becomes repressed. A common result of this is a retreat into hopelessness, silent grief (or depression), complacency, and impotence. When the Wood phase is repressed this way, it is said to “overact” or “insult” the phase responsible for controlling it, in this case the Metal phase. This overacting (by way of repressing healthy anger) opposes the Control Cycle. Wood’s kickback on the Metal phase can result in repressed grief, which might cause us to feel apathetic and lethargic, purposeless or depressed (symptoms of both repressed anger and blocked grief). Stifled grief in turn generates more anger, and without a healthy means to express this anger, leads to violent destruction of what we love, all of which fuels climate imbalance.
In this we see the intricate interdependence and the cause and effect relationship among our emotions, and how their repression and overindulgence lead to careless polluting and ecocide. In this case, an intolerance of—and inability to healthily express—the Yang emotion of anger leads to an excess of Yin grief. If we can’t grieve, more anger builds, and the vicious positive feedback loop persists until emotional intelligence comes to the rescue. Our inability to express healthy anger causes injustice and malevolence to persist unchecked and unchallenged. This is what happens when anger does not rise up to serve its sacred activist role of protection and boundary-setting. Examples are the ongoing desecration of natural refuges and discrimination against indigenous peoples when enough of us don’t collectively speak up for their rights.
Skillfully expressing anger in a manner that is not manipulative or abusive is an art worth mastering and an essential tool for bringing about social and environmental justice. When expressing anger to others, we can express our upset and even raise our voices. We should use “I” statements as much as possible, abide by the facts, and refrain from name-calling and personal attacks that shame and belittle another. An example, said in a low or loud voice, might sound like: “I am really upset you didn’t pay me back and I don’t like how you repeatedly ignore my requests for repayment. I really don’t like being taken advantage of like this.”
If we can also contact our care and love when we are upset, and allow these more Yin tender feelings to infuse our Yang anger, we create an amalgam that empowers both polarities for passionate, meaningful communication. This is usually easier, and more authentic, once we’ve vented our initial anger-fire, which is why sitting with and venting strong anger before confronting another (when possible) is often helpful.
• Exercise •
Expressing Healthy Anger
The next time you need to express your anger to another, first do a practice delivery in private. Begin by writing or speaking out your raw anger as a stream of consciousness, without censorship. Pause and rest as you need to. Take a break when you have finished.
Before expressing your next practice round of anger delivery, see if you can identify what you care about that your anger is protecting; anger often defends something we value. Reflect or write about your care and allow yourself to feel that care and love. If you care about the person you are upset with, see if you can feel your care for them along with your anger. In your next practice round of expressing your anger in private, try to allow your vulnerability and sense of hurt come through and influence the delivery of your anger.
If this integration of Yin (care) and Yang (anger) emotion feels good to you, when and if you feel ready to express yourself to the person who hurt you, try delivering your upset in this integrated way. If you journaled your practice sessions, consider first speaking it out in private.
Anger is also vital for motivating rebellion unto revolution. We want to be careful, however, not to always express our anger impulsively, through aggression and resistance. We can also express it wisely by harnessing anger’s passion and applying it skillfully to each situation. Combined with the Yin emotions of grief and fear, the Yang energy of anger is a key ingredient for climate activism. It’s the cayenne pepper that gives the needed kick to the hearty soup of change-making. Anger, and a dash of fear, kicks us in the ass to get up and do something. Grief curbs anger’s intensity and destructive capacity—when appropriate—and infuses it with compassion, patience, and wisdom. The result is integrated, measured action informed by wisdom and possessing the necessary passion to let others know we mean business.
Utilizing the healthy volition in anger propels us to rebel against climate crisis and challenge our governments (especially local) to make desperately needed top-down policy change. I discuss this further in the context of Extinction Rebellion in Chapter 11. The same mobilizing energy of anger also propels bottom-up, personal lifestyle changes for consuming less (degrowth). Rising up in outrage to protect what we love shares energetic poetry with the Wood phase energy of sap rising in spring. It is an example of sustainable action. Also embracing grief (downward and inward energy) prevents our outrage (upward and outward energy) from becoming excessively volatile, sabotaging anger’s protective role.
Via these Five Phase dynamics, we see how an embrace of both grief and anger regenerates us and the world we inhabit. Please don’t worry if you don’t fully grasp the Five Phase details I’m describing here. The takeaway is that all emotions—not just anger and grief—need to be skillfully worked with because each has a sacred role to play in both personal and planetary wellness. Understanding the Yin and Yang dynamics of emotion places them in a holistic context that connects our inner lives with the outer world in shared oneness. When we successfully enact emotional intelligence, we create positive feedback loops for increased eco-human thriving.
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It’s worth mentioning that feeling all our emotions does not mean we wallow in or immediately act on these emotions. More important is that we embody, work with, and then act on them—this is the heart of emotional intelligence. Case in point: in a discussion of emotional responses to climate crisis, a colleague asserted that grief is not the emotion we need to be feeling right now. I responded that this assumes we have the choice not to feel grief. Indeed, we often don’t have this choice, and embodying our grief can actually help us generate a clearer, more genuine, and passionate climate response.
In a letter responding to the suggestion that climate scientists tend to repress grief on the job, professor Andy Radford acknowledges that unacknowledged grief “can cloud judgement, inhibit creativity and engender a sense that there is no way forward.” 38 In the same letter, its coauthor, Dr. Steve Simpson, adds: “Instead of ignoring or suppressing our grief, environmental scientists should be acknowledging, accepting and working through it.” 39
The suggestion to avoid grief also overlooks the importance of grief’s role in curbing anger, as previously discussed, as well as grief’s compassion-generating and wisdom-birthing power. When grief is repressed, it can transform into anger and rage via the reciprocity of Yin-Yang, whereby one extreme transforms into the other. This fuels war-mongering, imperialism, domestic violence, bullying, and injustice of all kinds. Especially for men, anger is easier to express and is less stigmatized than grief. Arizona-based psychologist Todd Linaman speaks to these many dynamics: “For many people, chronic anger is an expression of unresolved grief. They may unconsciously exchange the emotions most often associated with grief because it makes them feel weak and vulnerable. Anger, on the other hand, serves as a sort of force field that shuts us down so we don’t have to go any farther in the grieving process. It allows us to turn our uncomfortable feelings outward onto others. While this can affect anyone, men, in particular, struggle with expressing deep, personal grief.” 40
We might feel grief or anger for a few seconds, or it might flood our psyche for weeks and months. Still, we can take measures to reduce our emotional suffering and employ emotional passion to our benefit. With practice, we become more skillful at finding balance between sitting with our emotions and expressing ourselves in the moment. We can pay more attention to subtle messages—such as “whispers” from our deeper self—for when to let insults go and when to take them to heart. We become more attuned to knowing when to be patient and when to be spontaneous—everything has its season. Each situation, and each of us, merits unique balance in this regard—a personalized, seasonal prescription for psychic and ecological sanity best guided by an amalgamation of established wisdom, trial and error, and our own intuition.
Full-Spectrum Love
Let’s recap. Healthy grief opens and softens our hearts so we can intimately know for what, and how deeply, we care. Healthy expression of anger creates boundaries to appropriately protect what we love. Clearing our pain via grief is as important as venting pain via anger. Held in dialectical balance, these interdependent emotional energies help curb and thereby bend the otherwise straight lines of Yin and Yang into the integrated circle they comprise together. This way, anger and grief support one another and contribute to a thriving inner and outer world, represented by Yin and Yang in dynamic balance. Holistic emotional intelligence requires learning how to face, embrace, modulate, integrate, and express emotion for love in action. Use the Ten Steps for Emotional Intelligence listed at the beginning of this chapter to guide you.
The Yin-Yang symbol also beautifully represents love in the form of grounded care. Such full-bodied love is all the seasons and their corresponding phases wholly embraced so they can robustly sustain one another along the Control and Generation cycles depicted in Figure 4. An embrace of each phase and its corresponding emotion allows the cycle to turn. Whole-bodied love, then, includes anger, grief, fear, joy, and all our other emotions wisely worked with. This is the soulful “better living through chemistry” we have been missing in the industrial age.
To be sustainable, love must be more than a feeling or a willful effort. It must amount to more than trying to be nice and peaceful. Shadow work and integration of our dark emotions is the long-term strategy for sustainable joy and truly loving, regenerative acts. While superficial love is often unaware of its shadow, deep, wise love includes what is sacredly dark, difficult, and fertile. Love is enough, but it must be this kind of full-spectrum love. Without this, what I call climate bypassing results—the denying of difficult emotions that arise in relation to climate change that leads to our ignoring climate crisis and prevents us from wholeheartedly engaging with it.
We recall a core message of holistic medicine’s metaphorical framework: we are intertwined with the natural world in a reciprocity of oneness. The Five Phases, including their emotional correspondences, represent this interrelationship. Hopefully, you can now more deeply grasp how a lack of emotional intelligence has driven our current climate predicament. You might also better understand how emotional intelligence is foundational for radical regeneration of humanity and the natural world. These latter assertions will be more robustly evidenced in the chapters ahead.
Cognitive-Emotional Process Tools
This discussion of welcoming emotion warrants an important caveat: it’s not always helpful to unconditionally embrace emotion, especially if we are excessively out of balance. In these instances, denying an emotional excess in order to preserve equanimity and remain more functional is often more appropriate. Examples include clinical anxiety and depression, emotional dysregulation from substance abuse and triggering events, and extreme stress. In these cases, rather than using a psychodynamic, depth-oriented, transformational approach appropriate to grief work and healing old love wounds, we most often want to “fix” these imbalances via mitigation, as we do physical imbalances. Here, the psychotherapeutic modalities of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) 41 are more appropriate psychological healing approaches. CBT and DBT address changing how we think and behave as a way to better regulate how we feel. A combination of depth and cognitive approaches may also be helpful. Engaging in depth work when cognitive behavioral work is called for, or vice versa, can lead to harm. Guidance from a psychotherapist in these instances is recommended.
A psychodynamic approach to psychotherapy can be understood as exploration of the relationship between conscious and unconscious cognitive and emotional dynamics that shape our motivations and personality. CBT and DBT generally do not prioritize or look for meaning in thoughts, emotions, and even personal narratives, while psychodynamic work does. Although CBT and DBT help us regulate our emotions when we feel too far out of balance (dysregulated), they can be incorporated into psychodynamic work to help “titrate” (gradually process and integrate) strong emotional experiences and gain overarching perspective, as I’ll discuss further along. Just as we welcome all of our emotions, all these therapeutic modalities are important for cultivating emotional intelligence and resiliency, for letting the seasonal vicissitudes of Yin and Yang become sustainable enough to transform and not derail us.
“Titration” is a term borrowed from chemistry. As applied to psychological work, it means to gradually digest difficult, strong emotions, a little at a time, so they don’t overwhelm and derail us. Titration often happens automatically, such as when we instinctively buffer ourselves from feeling the full impact of grief, anger, or anxiety all at once.
Let’s explore how to titrate anger without dangerously repressing it. Raw, volatile anger often has few remunerating physiological benefits, except for when it saves our lives! Letting ourselves get too angry too often damages our health and our relationships. We can practice reducing anger’s intensity (and that of other emotions too) through deep breathing, exercising, and reducing general stress levels. As shared earlier, we can also sit with and feel anger, without expressing it outwardly. Consciously taking a “time-out” from a heated argument to simmer down also helps us titrate, and thereby regulate, our anger. This way we feel and discharge anger over a longer time span while not letting it precipitate hurtful actions. This is not repression but skillfulness. It is both self-care and care of others so we are not at the behest of anger’s destructive, greedy, self-perpetuating demands.
To prevent emotional overwhelm and aid in its titration, we can engage in healthy denial. This means we can take breaks from focusing on overwhelming emotional states by, for example, deliberately distracting ourselves. Neurochemically, anger inhibits activity in our prefrontal cortex, a region of our brains involved with self-reflection and the critical thinking needed to ascertain facts and regulate ourselves. If we feel overcome by rage in a disagreement with a lover or at the corruption and inaction of our government on climate change, for example, we can take a time-out or choose an activity that distracts us from our anger. This helps our reasoning, prefrontal cortex to come back online so we can reflect on the facts, which is difficult to do in the heat of upset.
We can also titrate grief. Grief is heavy and can leave us depleted and unmotivated. Going out to dinner with friends, watching a movie, or taking a walk to get breaks from protracted grief are all forms of healthy denial that help us release and recharge. They leave us better equipped to resume the grieving process as necessary. I find that paying attention to my body’s sensations helps me determine when I need breaks from grief. This indicator is similar to other bodily cues, such as those for hunger or the need to get up from writing to move around. Just because I distract myself and take a break from full-on grieving doesn’t mean the grief leaves me. It’s there in the background, always, and I allow it to be, consciously straddling a tension of opposites between it and other emotions, including joy.
Healthy denial is never meant to become perpetual denial or suppression. As a general guideline, denial of or distraction from emotion is healthy and helpful when conscious and intermittent, and unhelpful when unconscious and persistent. It’s important to come back again and again to a fuller embrace of grief, for as long as it persists. Doing so helps grief pass more readily, sanely, and organically from an acute stage into the background of our lives. Equally, we should be mindful not to embrace grief too tightly just for the hope it passes sooner. Too much eagerness to get through grief blocks us from fully embodying it, and, paradoxically, perpetuates it. Rushing the process also deprives us of grief’s sacred gifts to us, which include dissolving our pain and releasing our finer jewels of being human as a greater capacity to love. Because climate grief is ongoing and perpetual, we should also get used to this sadness and not be in a rush to get somewhere, save to net-zero carbon emissions!
Clearing Our Hearts
In the spirit of resolving past and present pain to nourish our triangle of resilience relationships, let’s take a look at some more real-life dynamics. Many of us grew up unable to express ourselves sufficiently or to regulate overwhelming experiences, and to this day we may feel repressed, numb, and unrequited. The initial work to heal this is to express ourselves and to seek out the company of those who can hear us—including ourselves. By showing up for ourselves and by finding others who will hear and acknowledge us, we can rewire our brains, heal our hearts, and begin to change our experience from emptiness and apathy to fulfillment and purpose. Identifying our unhelpful habits, releasing backlogged emotion, and changing our patterns and choices all create space for new and nourishing experiences to enter our lives. In the process, little or “nothing” is left behind, as this poem “Rest of Longing,” which I wrote from the midst of emotional death and rebirth work, conveys:
Rest of Longing
Trust those places
With no way out,
The dark corridors
Of your longing.
In fact, entrust them more
Than you give to daylight
Which disappears
With fall of night.
Only hidden light
That waits for you in shadows
Can reveal the invisible
Passage from darkness
That leaves nothing
Behind.
Both the release of backlogged emotion and the fulfillment of our need to be heard and acknowledged can happen beautifully and simultaneously in therapy. We can supplement therapy by acknowledging ourselves each day through supportive self-talk, tending to emotions that surface, journaling, and other forms of self-care that give us nourishing respite from inner work and allow our difficult emotions to transform us.
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Emotional Self-Care
Which of the following activities do you feel would help you be kinder to yourself in the midst of healing your heart?
• Soothing self-talk: Repeat some kind, affirming words to soothe and encourage yourself. Examples include, “It’s okay, you’re going to be better for this.” Or, “I love you, hang in there.” You can express such affirmations silently or by saying them out loud to yourself. Hearing yourself say the words often has more impact.
• Be with feelings: When difficult emotions surface, allow yourself to pause what you’re doing and be with them. If feelings are overwhelming, how can you receive support, and what are some healthy ways to reduce their intensity?
• Write it out: Pick up your journal or some paper and write your feelings and other expressions or insights as a way to be present with yourself. You may want to seek the unconditionally listening ear of a friend as you share and process your feelings and thoughts.
• Your Own Wisdom: In what other ways can you be kind to yourself during this time of self-healing? Which do you feel ready to enact?
We can also engage in other forms of creative self-expression such as singing, expressive movement, and having fun. All these allow us to express, release, recharge, and bear witness to ourselves, so we can love ourselves into more wholeness, and by extension heal the world into greater balance through our presence and love in action.
Viewed through the lens of Yin and Yang, we have to empty ourselves (a Yin-clearing experience) of backlogged pain that clutters and stymies our heart in order to replenish (a Yang-filling experience) with something new and good. Ideally, we want to enter the depths of our pain so we can fill from that same depth. This joins conscious Yang experience with subconscious Yin depths, as we fulfill our quest for individuation, integration, and Yin-Yang’s perennial promise for regeneration. This way, Yang-release and Yin-fulfillment happen simultaneously—our neuronally-encoded memories and attendant repressed emotions of the past are activated, released, and reconfigured by empathic, new learning in the present.
A Higher Road
Once we have integrated enough of our previous emotional wounds, we may feel sufficiently empowered in our sense of self, in our sovereignty. As a result, we may not feel compelled to express all our emotions. It’s easier to let go of smaller insults as an adjustment we make for the greater good. We will still feel all our feelings, but choose not to express them outwardly, or to do so in edited form. We are more able to “take the high road” without feeling repressed or unduly compromised in the process. This way, we can bring our relationships with ourselves and others to a new level.
Taking this higher path will not feel like an unreasonable sacrifice because the work we do to clear our emotional backlog helps us be more mindful of, and less charged about, our emotional triggers. We’re not so ruled by them that they powerfully and negatively potentiate our present experience. None of this means we tolerate abuse, meanness, and other violations in the present.
While expressing and releasing backlogged emotion leads to more liberation and joy, a compulsive need to constantly express and act out “our truth” can be a self-indulgent trap and ironically, a burden and an obstacle to growth. After enough truth-telling, another kind of freedom might present: to not fully embody and take to heart each feeling, but instead to let go of the “small stuff.” When we grow in emotional intelligence, we have the self-awareness to choose restraint as a response. It can be a welcome relief not to have to indulge our truth of disparaging thoughts and difficult feelings, and thereby not toss logs onto the fire of conflict and misunderstanding. This might look like not having to be right, loosening our boundaries to allow more connection, and holding back anger in disagreements.
Holding Space
Having the genuine capacity to moderate or forego acting out emotional reactivity and “truth” allows us to be of more service. We enact these restraints to the extent we are able to without doing ourselves harm. When we can gracefully set aside our own upset and offer an empathic, non-reactive response, we help others find sanctuary in their own projections and displaced emotions which arise from wounded and dysregulated states. This is not codependency but mirroring integrity and self-sovereignty. The ability to show up and help others regulate is a potent heart-gift as climate crisis worsens, and will be increasingly so in the more challenging years to come. This is why healing our historical pain now must be a top priority.
As emotional dysregulation increases due to climate chaos, those of us able to hold neutral space and reflect care to others in distress provide vital medicine for our times. For myself, witnessing another settle into their vulnerability, open their heart, and find new strength gives me profound satisfaction. Deeply hearing the truth of others during the climate change discussion and support groups I facilitate is an especially nourishing experience. I also have been fortunate to be on the receiving end of this kind of compassion, which has helped me “pay it forward” by embodying it with others.
As collective fear, dysregulation, and trauma increase with global climate change fever, we will need more of us to bring coolness, wisdom, and comfort to chaos. These latter Yin dispositions help balance dysregulated Yang chaos and violence. Many have enacted this succor for displaced victims during recent wildfires. On my home turf in Hawaii, I and a dozen other lava flow evacuees were welcomed in by a loving couple who gave us a place to stay on their farm. They asked for nothing in return, and we all found unique ways to contribute as best we could. Their big hearts and gestures of loving-kindness not only helped me immensely during a devastating time of loss, but impressed and changed me in ways I’m still discovering.
Loss, when endured with an open heart, fortifies us to be a harbor for ourselves and others in challenging times. We can be the safe, nurturing, Yin-holders for grief and remorse as well as the strong, Yang-pillars to resist injustice and violence. Until we have substantially unburdened our hearts by working through our core love wounds, it can be challenging to show up for others as much as we’d like. We might even be repulsed by their wounds. As Father Gregory Boyle, founder of the largest gang member rehabilitation center in the world, aptly states: “… if you don’t welcome your wounds, you may be tempted to despise the wounded.” 42
Full Circle
When we view our own emotions as forces common to all of nature and its seasons—in the frenzied and creative buzz of springtime, in summer’s bright and easy joy, in autumn’s falling leaves and gradual descent inward, or in winter’s foreboding, desolate landscape—we foster wholeness vis à vis our relationship with the Earth.
Emotions also underlie our beliefs and decisions, heavily influencing our actions. This understanding has been borne out by pioneering neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who has shown that emotion, often imperceptible to us, governs our decision-making. 43 Because our actions impact the natural world we depend upon for our wellness, we had better sort out our emotional lives if we want to work harmoniously together and act wisely to heal climate change. In a paper published in “Critical Psychology,” ecopsychologist Dr. David Kidner highlights the link between our capacity to feel and averting ecological disaster. He writes: “… our current reliance on cognition and our corresponding marginalization of sensing and feeling, in addition to undermining human well-being, may be ecologically catastrophic.” 44 To be clear, we need both clear thinking and robust emotional lives working in harmony for a better world.
Because Yin and Yang are inextricably interdependent, they mutually support and balance each other. We have seen this to be the case with grief and anger, a dynamic duo for environmental activism and coping with all manner of upset and injury. We can especially remember balance between grief and anger (and other emotions) in response to climate change injuries, political shenanigans, the challenges of working together to resist and reform, and our personal relationship struggles. Letting go of the small stuff and taking the high road helps us stay focused on our most heartfelt goals. In the next chapters we will explore the dynamics of fear and anxiety and how to “mine and manage them” to better weather and thrive through climate crisis.
When we embrace all Five Phase emotions and express them skillfully and appropriately, we create more harmonious relations with all our triangle of resilience relationships—with ourselves, with those we love, and with the natural world we must learn to bless … again and again.
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Chapter 3 Journaling
Please also refer to the additional in-text exercises for this chapter.
Take out your journal or notepad, place it in front of you, and write out your responses to the following prompts.
1. How could you simplify your outer life and decrease unnecessary stress? How can you reduce your overhead and financial spending to make more time for inner and outer activism?
2. Turn back to the start of this chapter and review the Five Phases and all their characteristics. Which phase/s most strongly represent your personality, and which phase/s don’t? Write down the characteristics from each phase with which you most strongly identify, as well as those with which you don’t identify. Then, for each characteristic you identify with, briefly journal about how you would like to encourage or discourage it in your life. Do the same for the characteristics with which you don’t identify.
36. Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, 213.
37. Stone, “Climate Change Fueled the Australia Fires. Now Those Fires Are Fueling Climate Change.”
38. Weston, “‘They Should Be Allowed to Cry’: Ecological Disaster Taking Toll on Scientists’ Mental Health.”
39. Ibid.
40. Linaman, “Is It Anger or Unresolved Grief?”
41. Grohol, “What’s the Difference Between CBT and DBT?”
42. French, “Father Gregory Boyle, Author of New Book, to Pasadena Audience: Consider Radical Kinship and Compassion.”
43. Camp, “Decisions Are Largely Emotional, Not Logical: The Neuroscience Behind Decision-Making.”; Purves, “The Interplay of Emotion and Reason.”
44. Kidner, “Depression and the natural world: toward a critical ecology of psychological distress.”