A heart filled with emotions
Joy, irritation, frustration, relief: we constantly experience emotions. Some are pleasant, and we enjoy them, and others are unpleasant, so we prefer to get rid of them. Think of the anger you feel during a fight with your partner or your fear of what the future may hold or your sense of frustration because your day doesn’t go the way you would like.
What are emotions and what are they not?
Each experience is accompanied by thoughts, emotions and feelings (bodily sensations):
- Thoughts are most prominent in our Western society. We like to think of ourselves as rational beings who think logically and take sound decisions. Therefore, the Indian mystic Sadhguru compares thoughts to the engine of a train.
- Emotions are the ‘juicy’ part of your thoughts. They point out our needs, boundaries and motivations to us. Emotions are powerful and we can be overcome by them. Sadhguru says that this is the last carriage of the train: when the engine has passed, it takes time for the last carriage to pass. Emotions have a certain ‘drag time’.
- Feelings play their part in our bodies and are connected to our emotions, such as the oppressive sensation in your chest when you’re sad or the strangled feeling in your throat when you’re afraid. With these feelings, our bodies are trying to tell us something.
Emotions are important
Firstly, because they are always there. Brain research has shown that emotions come from a specific part of the brain, so they are truly a part of being human. Secondly, they are real direction indicators: they tell us how our internal world reacts to the external world. Thirdly, emotions give colour to our lives and give it meaning.
How to deal with emotions: it’s your choice!
Now that you know what emotions are and why they are important, the question remains: ‘How do I deal with them?’ There are three choices: ignore them, push them away or embrace them.
Ignoring them or pushing them away – even though it’s tempting sometimes – this approach will turn against you. You would be cloaking a part of yourself in shadows and won’t be able to see what’s there anymore. That emotional ‘‘carriage’ would still be rattling on and would continue to influence the way you function and grow, at present and in the future.
To embrace emotions is not the easiest path to take because, more often than not, we were never taught how to do it. But it is the key to a more fulfilling and authentic life, as both Western psychologists and Eastern philosophers agree. In the next blog article, I will explain how you can deal with emotions in an integral way in four steps.
