I'm contemplating the amptlitude of waves.

Is it better to experience the highs and lows of deep emotion--fierce anger, consuming love, abject depression, abounding joy--or to temper the fires of feeling and moderate the psychological swings up and down?

It's not that I see the lows as a problem. I don't enjoy deep depression, but it has its place. It's necessary, as these things go, to balance out joys and happiness. I have no problem with swinging into low times, so long as they're balanced by highs.

Problem is that yoga (and if I have any spiritual discipline at this time, it's yoga) teaches temperance and moderation of emotion, taming all the fires into balance within the body, mind, and heart. I have temperance under control, dammit, and I'm not sure that I like it. I miss the ecstasies and passions of my life in Christianity. I miss intensity. I miss passion. And I miss the art that it allowed me to create.

I feel as though I may have tempered my emotions too well. Nothing really affects me. Nothing really moves me. No one really disappoints me. No one really angers me. I feel the mild, day-to-day versions of all these things: frustration instead of disappointment; annoyance instead of anger; contentment instead of joy. I experience emotion in pastel.

My conundrum centers around this question: what is the right way to be? Is there a right way to be? There may be an evolutionarily advantageous way to be; there may be a created order that I could follow. I'm not sure about either of those things. And if neither is absolute, then the real question is of who and how I *want* to be.

That I can answer easily: I want to feel.

But with that decided, I find I don't know *how.*