Emotion Awareness Day

Today’s a reminder that our emotional life matters—not just as a private experience, but as something that shapes how we show up in the world.

To be emotionally aware is to stay with what we feel long enough for it to take shape. To find a word, a gesture, a movement, a sound, a picture, or a symbol that lets our knowing come into form.

This sometimes fragile experience in us is not weakness. These wants and longings are not mere indulgence. They are fundamental, deeply rooted, and to be revered, because they signify what makes us human.

At times there are feelings we find hard to name. They can reside like a pressure that wants to emote but doesn’t know how. One such feeling many quietly carry is “Oh no.” But it’s a particular kind of oh no—not fear, not panic, but the slow-breaking ache in the chest when we witness something deeply wrong. It’s no simple container. It carries heavy things.

We live in an age that often doesn’t know how to stay with this feeling.
Instead, we try to bury it.
We numb it.
Distract from it.
Mock it.
Sometimes we even weaponize it.

But the ancients had a name for this kind of sorrow.

A word that gave form to the deeply rooted agony of witnessing harm and not turning away: woe.

Woe is not rage.
It is not curse.
It is grief with moral vision.
It is sorrow that stays present.
A deep-seated ache that refuses to go numb.

May we remember:
To feel is to live.
And to stay with what woes us is how we stay human—and how we stay grounded in our sense of what is true and right.