As a teenager I was thrown off by emotion and tried to block it out. Then, in my early twenties, during my initial experiments with Buddhist and Taoist meditation, I worked on letting my emotions pass like a cloud. This was interesting as it opened up a working relationship with my emotional reality very much like how I described working with the unconscious in the chapter Slowing Down Time. Instead of being dominated by or denying my passions, I slowly learned how to observe them and feel how they infused my moment with creativity, freshness, or darkness.
