Collective emotions
From Tarot for Change, Jessica Dore:
But with emotions, it’s not always clear who “owns” them. I’ve woken up heavy with the boulder of my grandmother’s grief on my chest, breathed deeply while sweating from the fire of my mother’s rage, and I could say, “That’s theirs, not mine,” if I wanted to, but what good would that do? Emotions are living energetic currents with life cycles of their own. They tend to survive down the vertical and horizontal lines of human relationships—through generations, through communities—until they arrive to the place where they can be fully experienced and expressed. That can take a while.
It seems to me that when an emotion arrives, it’s yours to deal with, regardless of where it came from. If a storm comes and floods your house, would you search for whom the water belonged to and then send the nearest large body of water a bill for the damage? When the house floods, it is inconsequential which body of water or whose territory it was where the rain clouds formed. No one asks, no one cares. If you’re in it, it’s yours to deal with.
So often our problems in the emotional space stem from beliefs that grief means we did something wrong or that if we’re angry, we ought to be ashamed. We don’t have to look at it this way. Emotions come from all kinds of places; we can be like the cup and make a space to receive them.
Emotions and imagination transcend what we consider to be personal limitations in that they’re experienced both individually and collectively. A feeling or fantasy can be private, but can also be shared between two people, a group, or a family. People in cultures all over the world in geographic isolation from one another have generated and told stories with motifs and characters that echo or resemble one another since time out of mind. You will experience some emotions and you won’t know where they came from. You won’t be able to intellectually trace back the origins, and I don’t think you necessarily need to.