The Gravity of Our Emotions
I felt crushed under the weight of my grief.
My eyelids struggled to separate from the tears that glued them shut the night before. Comforting darkness gave way to blinding daylight. The afternoon sun streamed through the curtains, toasting my toes as I stood on the plush carpet below. A disorienting queasiness arose. My fingertips grazed the wallpaper to my left.
Is this really real? I thought. Is this really my reality?
I exited my bedroom and landed in the living room. The TV was black as midnight. The stove slumbered. The phone was docked like an abandoned ship. An eerie silence coated the house like a fine layer of dust. I was utterly alone.
A glisten appeared out of the corner of my eye. I approached a picture frame and picked it up. It was a photo of my mom and I in Miami. A glisten of a different kind filled my eyes. Droplets rained down on the photograph as a realization came over me: She’s gone. She’s really gone.
The flashbacks descended. I saw the hospital room where it all happened just hours before. I envisioned myself holding her hand and whispering my final goodbye in her ear. I could see the incontrovertible agony on the faces of my sister and my father.
She’s really gone.
A chasm felt like it opened up in my chest as the picture frame leapt and shattered on the floor. Gravity had won once again.
The Gravity of Our Emotions
Gravity is one of four fundamental forces of nature, part of the glue that binds together our reality. The planets loyally orbit the sun because of gravity. The tides regularly ebb and flow because of gravity. Gravity keeps the heavens running like a well-oiled machine. The force of gravity is a Universal constant; it is consistent and reliable, like a train that always departs and arrives on time. Gravity is formidable, immovable, and pervasive. Like Goliath or Achilles, gravity is one of the great warriors of our world. It does not serve us to mess with this law of nature.
But what if we could befriend it? What if, instead of approaching gravity as a foe, we got to know it instead? Might we find a way to hack the equation? Let’s start at the beginning, with the discovery of gravity itself.
Sir Isaac Newton, as the story goes, synthesized the force of gravity when he witnessed an apple fall from a nearby tree. Curious about why the apple fell down to the ground and not in some other manner, he was determined to make sense of this routine ritual and mundane occurrence. Published along with his groundbreaking three laws of motion in his seminal work, Principia, Newton surmised that every object in the Universe is attracted to every other object with a force that is directly proportional to the combination of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
Newton’s work turned the world on its head. He created what we now know as calculus. He had a profound impact on the world of physics and mechanics. He paved the way for Einstein’s theory of relativity. His work had gravitas.
It doesn’t take a scientist to realize that our experiences have weight. Take a look at some of the language you use to describe your personal reality and you’ll see just what I mean. Phrases like “he’s so lighthearted,” “I feel like getting high,” and “she’s falling in love” all point to this truth. Life feels heavy or light. At any given time and in any given moment, we are oscillating between each one of these ends of the spectrum—and feeling a mix of emotions along this scale of heaviness.
I have a theory. I believe that our emotions operate on this spectrum of light to heavy because, like the planets and the stars and the oceans, the same sacred laws and fundamental forces of our Universe govern them. The energetic substrate that Newton observed when he watched the apple get pulled to the ground from the tree is the same milky magic that constitutes our internal world as well.
Emotions are nothing more than energy in motion, our highest and most noble desires to be and connect with others set into motion by the forces of the Universe. When we are properly in tune with these forces of energy, we can achieve the impossible. We can put a man on the moon. We can split the atom. We can put our restlessness to rest. The world feels light. Hope abounds. When we are not in tune with these forces, we lock ourselves in a cage. Life feels heavy and confining for those who try to defy and resist and suppress the natural order of things. Change feels suffocating. Fear abounds.
The morning after my mom died, I felt incomparably oppressed by these forces. There was a lump in my throat, a heaviness in my chest, stress locked away in the recesses of my body. I was resisting the reality of the situation. I was pulling on the fabric of space and time, desperately tugging to bring her back from the veil that separated us. I think many of us experience this heaviness from time to time. You can feel it after a breakup or when you get diagnosed with cancer or when you’re let go from your job. Life as we know it changes and we feel heavy. But what exactly makes it feel heavy? What are the factors from which emotional gravity derives its power? What can we do about it? Let’s unpack those questions and more.
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Newton proposed that there are two primary determinations when calculating the force of gravity: Mass and distance. His formula accounted for each factor like so, where F is the force, G is the gravitational constant, M and m are the masses of the two objects, and r is the distance between them:
This means that the force of gravity increases as the masses of the objects grow larger, and decreases as the distance increases between them. Therefore, the more massive the objects and the closer together they are, the greater the gravity between them.
So how does this apply to our emotional lives? What do mass and distance have to do with our emotions? Allow me to translate for you. I believe there are two factors that determine the force that gravity will wield on our emotions. The first factor is our expectations. Similar to mass in Newton’s equation, our expectations (E and e) are directly proportional to the force of emotional gravity. The higher our expectations, the greater the gravity of our emotions when those expectations are fulfilled or unfulfilled. The other factor in emotional gravity is our willingness (w) to experience the emotion. Similar to distance in Newton’s equation, the greater our willingness to feel, the weaker the gravity becomes. Thus, the formula for emotional gravity is rewritten as:
There’s already some anecdotal evidence to support the role that our expectations play in our emotions. In their book, Engineering Happiness, authors Rakesh Sarin and Manel Baucells purport that Happiness equals Reality minus Shifting Expectations. What I believe to be missing from that formula, though, is the willingness to feel happiness—or any emotion for that matter—in the first place. The more engaged we become in our emotional lives, the less we are blindsided by our expectations. The lower our expectations become, the more willing we are to feel our emotions. They are each mitigating factors for the other.
In other words, the more we keep an open heart, the less likely that heart is to break under the pressure of gravity. When we resist an arising energy, it magnifies in intensity within us. This is what Eckhart Tolle meant when he wrote in A New Earth that, “Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.” Resistance and expectation, therefore, are the great amplifiers of our emotional experience. The more a force of energy does not align with our expectations and the less we want to feel it, the more gravity it will wield, the heavier it will be, and the more intense it will feel. This is why we become disproportionately upset when something we desperately wanted to happen doesn’t come to fruition. The expectation of an outcome that never materializes magnifies the way we feel—increases its gravitas in our lives. Unwanted energy loses its power over you the second you remove the label and reclassify it as merely energy instead. This is what it means to mitigate or defy emotional gravity.
Life, as it turns out, isn’t so much about what we feel as it is about allowing ourselves to feel our feelings in general. Emotions are meant to be temporary exchanges of energetic information. When we grasp onto an emotion because it feels good, or keep it at arm’s length because it feels bad, that energy fails to work its way through us and becomes stored in our mind, body, and spirit. We become weighed down by our inability to let life unfold as it may. We increase the gravity of a situation when we expect it to be a certain way and aren’t willing for it to be any different than we imagined. We fall from grace.
In order to live a life that’s light and peaceful, we must be willing to do two things: Expect less and feel more. When we expect less, we open ourselves up to a world of possibilities outside of the confines of our expectations. The world expands when you stop locking yourself in a sandbox and discover the infinite beach instead. And when we allow ourselves to feel more, we’re able to take what we perceive to be the good and the bad in stride because we understand a simple truth: This too shall pass.
Grief is heavy but gratitude is light. Appreciation is how we release the heaviness and reach for lightness instead. Being grateful is a way to manage our expectations and increase our willingness to feel. Life just feels better when you know how to find the light in any darkness, the weightlessness in the heaviness, the diamond in any piece of coal. Any heartbreak becomes an opportunity to be pieced back together. No matter how crushing it felt.
Gravity is a force, not a foe. The more you know, the lighter it grows.
