Great Tantrics like Abhinavagupta teach us the secret of all the rasas. In this regard, all emotions are rasas. The nine emotional rasas are love, anger, disgust, courage, joy, fright, compassion, wonder and peace. Like a great artist or performer one must come to understand and be able to express all these rasas in their full scope. Then emotion becomes a tool of divine feeling and eternal joy which raises us up, not a poison that brings us down. These emotions belong to the Divine artist. When we expropriate them at an ego level, they become poisons. We must not be incapable even of negative emotions like anger or fear, but we must touch the energy behind them, not contract in the circumstances which create them.
In Tantra, emotion is the main area in which our life energy, our prana or Shakti is held. Suppressing emotion is like suppressing life. It causes death. But expressing raw emotion at an ego level is also destructive and disintegrating. The key is to go to the rasa of the emotion in the dance of Shiva, in which the Shakti will naturally be released.
Continued here.
