In the movie "Leon: The Professional", Mathilda comes to Leon saying that all her life she'd had a knot in her stomach, and now after knowing Leon for some months, she no longer has that knot. She interprets it as romantic love, but perhaps it was merely the patient acceptance of Mathilda as she was.
A large part of being happy is learning to be unhappy. Knowing to deal with unhappiness, we can explore it, understand it, and eventually leave it behind to become more joyful. By patiently accepting our emotions, just as Leon did for Mathilda, we can undergo this process.
When you do have a knot in your stomach or some other uncomfortable emotion, perhaps the suffering comes more from your interpretation than from the emotion itself. When we explore emotions with relaxed detachment, cradling the emotions, we might find there are other interpretations, or even that interpretations are unnecessary to simply observe things as they are.
We might even find that it's possible to experience more than one emotion at once, a state of "harmonious multivalence", enjoying a certain happiness that gives context to whatever discomfort we feel... untying the knot in our stomachs.
► Listen on DSound
► Listen from source (IPFS)