In this week’s blog, we share a deeply personal insight about emotions that changed everything for Petra. Discover how fully embodying our feelings, especially the uncomfortable ones, can become a profound source of connection, healing, and growth.

OCTOBER 10, 2025

In 2018, my world shattered abruptly. Losses I never anticipated swept through my life, carrying with them an ocean of grief so vast that it threatened to drown me.

At first, I reacted as most of us likely would. I tried to outrun it, outwork it, and rationalize it away. Emotions felt like disruptive waves, something to be managed, controlled, or at best, quickly resolved.

Despite my best efforts to suppress and get on with life, the grief continued to linger, shaping my days and catching up with me in my dreams.

It hid beneath productivity, whispered within moments of silence, and gradually revealed itself through exhaustion, tension, disconnection, and physical illness.

For over a year, I struggled quietly, believing emotional intelligence meant successfully managing these overwhelming feelings into neat compartments, something contained and tidy that made sense.

Then, just last year, grief returned, revisiting me unexpectedly.

Faced again with profound loss, I decided to make a different choice in that moment.

Instead of resisting or pushing to move past the pain, I consciously chose to stay present. This time, I decided to fully embody my grief, to allow it to move through me.

It was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made.

And it was by no means an easy or gentle process. Allowing grief to fully move through me came with real physical and emotional consequences. At times, my body responded intensely, manifesting illness and exhaustion that forced me to pause my professional commitments.

Yet, even within these challenges, there was a powerful clarity emerging. The act of embodiment was not a shortcut through grief but a genuine path toward deeper healing and understanding.

Most importantly, I didn't navigate this process alone. I leaned heavily into a supportive community of loved ones, coaches, and healers who held space for my experiences. Their presence reminded me that embodiment, particularly in moments of intense grief or vulnerability, is rarely meant to be done in isolation.

Still, initially, this practice felt counterintuitive, even dangerous. After all, emotional intelligence is often portrayed as a form of self-mastery, emphasizing control and composure.

But the more deeply I leaned into the discomfort, pain, darkness, and eventual illness, allowing myself to experience grief without restraint, the clearer it became that true emotional intelligence had little to do with management and everything to do with radical acceptance and embodied awareness.

Rather than overwhelming me, grief became a profound teacher. Beneath the sadness lay powerful messages about my values, insights about what mattered deeply to me, and profound clarity about relationships and purpose I wanted to nurture. Allowing my body to fully experience emotion without attempting to intellectualize it became a source of extraordinary wisdom and healing.

This embodied approach to emotion radically shifted my understanding.

Emotions were no longer obstacles to productivity or threats to self-control; they were precise messengers of truth. They provided insights unavailable through cognitive reflection alone. My conversations became richer, my relationships more honest, and my connection to myself more profound.

We often mistake emotional intelligence as a skill of managing or suppressing feelings, but perhaps genuine emotional intelligence resides precisely in our willingness to embody our emotions fully.

I invite you to consider a provocative shift: instead of striving to manage or contain your emotions, what if you fully embodied them? What if the feelings we often avoid are the very ones carrying the most potent wisdom? What could happen if you met discomfort, sadness, grief, or anxiety with curiosity and openness rather than resistance?

As you reflect on your experiences this week, notice how embracing your emotions fully, especially the uncomfortable ones, might deepen your self-awareness, purpose, and connection.

Our emotions, after all, are not distractions from our life’s work; they are essential companions and guides in our journey toward meaningful impact and authentic living.

Perhaps the most powerful realization of all is this: emotional intelligence is not a tool for control; it is a doorway to profound self-understanding and growth, waiting patiently for us to walk through it.

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