Next, the primary color of fear.

Acacia, blond, lemon, corn, and cadmium -- yellow has many, many variants of generic yellowness. In the same way the emotion fear can be expressed as panic, terror, dread, hysteria, desperation, apprehension, uptightness, worry, shyness, or hesitancy.

Which of these emotional variations of fear are you most acquainted with? Which do you habitually feel and express? Which do you see in others who are close to you? Explore the emotion of fear in yourself and in the world around you. Don't forget there can be a distance between feeling fear and demonstrating it, as there is a difference also between expressing fear and releasing it. Everyone feels fear at some time; how do you experience fear? What types of fear reside in different parts of your body? What happens when you close your eyes and give your full attention to anxiety, to worry, to agitation?

Draw, write, dance, sculpt and in other ways find creative expression to expand your emotional literacy by giving expression to fear. Every graduation of emotion that is given some outward expression lessens its hold on you.

Next, the primary color of hurt.

Absinthe, apple, khaki, keppel, laurel, and malachite -- green appears to us in many permutations and variations. In just the same way hurt can be betrayal, neglect, anguish, devastation, or pain.

Explore your personal patterns of feeling hurt. Learn to discern the exact shades of hurt that are familiar to you. Now, where precisely do you a hurt, how do you experience hurt, and what happens when you bring your attention to the physical location of painful emotions?

Apply the other principles of examination, exploration, expression, and release that we have discussed here and in the previous BLOGs in this series, concerning feeling and describing, and working with anger and sadness.

In the concluding part 5 next week we look at conditioned emotions and the freedom to feel.

BLOG entry #41