Emotions as Altars: Bowing Down to the Holy Without Sacrificing OurSelves

A powerful feeling of regret and shame made its way into me last night. It surprised me. An old familiar tug. I noticed it and began to get curious.

I surprised myself. I didn’t run, intellectualize, justify, or spiral.

I simply sat with it.

Not trying to solve it.

Not trying to change it.

Just watching.

It was as if I was meeting this emotion as a person. A being. A friend, even. Not attaching to it, but also not pushing it away. Just being with it, in reverent observation. Getting curious - getting to know it from a holy space.

I felt this overwhelming sense that I was bowing to it.

Not in surrender.

Not in sacrifice.

But in reverence.

Like kneeling before a sacred altar, I gave my attention.

Watched.

Listened.

And slowly, it moved.

Because all emotions move, when we let them.

They’re not fixed. They’re not who we are.

They are energy.

They are God speaking.

Holy messages, coded in sensation.

Then I thought, what if we lived like that?

What if we bowed before our emotions like altars - offering them prayer, presence, and holy attention. Honoring them deeply, without giving them the power to rule or define us?

Because when we attach to them, when we react from them, when we mistake them for our identity - we don’t honor them. We become prisoners of them. Slaves to the very energies meant to liberate us – meant to enhance our experience, meant to show us we’re beautifully and unmistakably human. We take a sacred alter, climb up on top of it, and sacrifice vital parts of ourselves - one by one.

They were never meant to chain us - only to pass through.

To carry sacred information.

To remind us we are alive, permeable, ever-changing.

And when we allow that movement, when we feel without fusing, something miraculous happens. We are freed by them. Transformed through them.

Imagine a world where we greet each emotion as a messenger, not a master.

Where we feel rage, grief, ecstasy, longing, not as mandates for action or evidence of failure, but as holy invitations to be with ourselves more truthfully.

To feel it all.

And still choose love.

Because when I can bow to this in me,

I can bow to it in you.

When I can love this in me,

I can love this in you.

Whether in me or in you,

No part is exiled.

No shadow is cast out.

Just wholeness embodied and embraced.

Perhaps this is key to practicing non-attachment, to walking the path of unconditional love – to realizing the peace that surpasses all understanding. Not resisting, not indulging - just honoring. Feeling it all, and letting it go, returning, again and again, to the altar of the present moment. Head bowed, heart wide, soul intact.