Emolution exists to remind us of an essential truth. Everything we need to know to tame the chaos in our world already exists within us. Right now. Humans are born with our most important tool we ever need: our bodies. This simple fact is often overlooked.

Emotions are a natural function of inhabiting this life in our bodies. Emotions are complex chemical reactions to thoughts or other stimuli within our immediate environments. Emotions are swift and uninhibited responses to our minute-to-minute observations. We are taught from a tender age to suppress, ignore or deny most emotions in our bodies – often even the ones we label as “good”. (Watch an extremely exuberant child in most public settings and see .)

We are taught to “manage” emotions, “deal” with them, “control” them. We sing countless songs about how they are in charge of us. We learn to view them mostly as something bad about ourselves – we learn to attend to something at the core of our being as flawed and negative. This fundamental negation of a core facet of being alive creates a vast array of consequences. Read or view any piece of literature and you will find that the seed of the piece is an emotion that has been denied, hidden or contained – and watch the resulting action tumble out from it. This is a primary source of our entertainment – watching or reading about the pitfalls of our emotional human condition.

Suppressing emotion leads to drama, conflict, disease and misery.

If we suppress this vital part of ourselves for most of our waking hours, we compound these conditions into ever-increasing ripples out from ourselves into our surrounding environments. But there is a different choice we can make. We can awaken to the wisdom contained within the emotion that courses through our bodies in response to our thoughts. If we learn to capture this information as it arises, and express it safely and harmlessly, we can dissolve a centuries-old pattern of repression and contraction.

We can allow the chemistry within us to inform us that something in our environment is asking us to take action – to be aware, to make a responsible choice. We empower ourselves. It is a simple but profound shift in our conscious choice-making ability.