While we ultimately want happiness in our lives, achieving this state requires feeling all of our emotions—the highs and the lows, the leaps forward as well as the setbacks. Emotions such as sadness, shame, anger, and fear are as necessary and integral to life’s drama as joy, pride, love, and courage. As Carl Jung once wrote, “Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” The key word here is balance. We don’t want negative feelings to color all of our perceptions, but we don’t want to totally exclude
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