“You must put aside your old self which has been corrupted by following illusory desires.  Your mind must be renewed by a spiritual revolution.”  –Ephesians 4:22-23

Pixar’s Inside Out reveals the inner workings of an 11-year-old girl’s emotions as her family moves across the country. Her core emotions of Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger often fight for control of her mind and reaction to different situations.  And as she produces new memories, different emotions get permanently associated with that memory.  Until Sadness starts touching old memories that used to be Joy-ful, and turns once happy memories into sad ones. As the young girl matures and faces her grief over the loss of her community, she realizes she doesn’t have to be cheerful for everyone else, but can have complex feelings of sadness and joy side-by-side.   It is a brilliant master course in understanding the inner workings of the heart.

In her book The Gifts of Imperfection, shame researcher Brené Brown discovers that wholehearted people practice resilience in the face of grief and pain. She explains that whole-hearted people 1) cultivate hope, 2) practice critical awareness, and 3) let go of numbing and taking the edge off vulnerability, discomfort and pain. She asks the key question: “How do you feel when you believe that you are powerless to change something in your life?”  Wholehearted people take the time to feel their emotions, pay attention to avoid behaviors that would numb the pain, and work through the discomfort of hard emotions. These people cultivate a sense of purpose that gives them hope in the midst of difficult emotions.  They gain perspective as they seek critical awareness of what meaning could be ascribed to the emotions.

As a person prone to bouts of depression, I have learned to accept sadness as a natural emotion to be embraced, not feared.  The pursuit of happiness drives me through my sadness, and sometimes I need sadness to truly find joy in certain circumstances.  I think of my children, who have just started 2nd and 4th grade.  My Facebook memories show them starting Kindergarten as if it was yesterday, and these memories fill me with a sense of wonder at the passing of time, or joy and sadness strangely mixed together.  I do not rush through the sadness or seek to numb it with mindless TV or substances.  I sit with it, embrace it, learn from it, grow.

In today’s comic, John Wesley deals with all the emotions that come from a surprise visit from his mother.  While his mother, Susanna, treated him as if he were specially chosen by God, she also routinely withheld her affection from him and refused to say she loved him.  This deeply troubled John and quite possibly led to his neuroses in his relationships with women.  This comic was a lot of fun to write.  I hope you enjoy it!