In touch. Emotions offer us instant feedback about our human experience. They continually inform us about how our interactions with the environment affect us. Emotions result from and allow us to be in touch with reality. Therefore, no emotion should be numbed, shamed, judged, banned or disowned.

In color. Emotions we experience as positively colored are the ones informing us what feels good to us, so we can seek more of the same situation. Conversely, emotions we experience as negatively colored inform us what feels bad to us, so we can try to avoid those situations

We can view emotions as letters that arrive in the mailbox of our awareness.
Expression. We can take a letter out of the mailbox and read it aloud. This is what we do when we express an emotion. Expressing our emotions allows us to understand where our emotions come from, to get into the depths of it.

Impression. We can also decide to take a letter without reading it. This is what happens when we become aware of an emotion, but decide to not fully express it. In this case, we take note of an emotion, but fail to fully grasp its message.

Suppression. Finally, we can decide to ignore certain kinds of letters and let them sit in the mailbox. We do this when we suppress, ignore, or deny our emotions. Eventually, emotions that are not accepted, processed and released take more and more space, attention and energy away from our experience of the present moment and the reality at large.