FEELING EMOTIONS IS KEY

EMOTIONS. HOW TO INTERACT WITH THEM

Feeling emotions is key in the process of learning to interact with them in a healthy and appropriate way. When we turn our attention to feel, we are no longer thinking, the intellect calms down and becomes momentarily quiet. All this activates our wonderful ability of feeling. The word emotion comes from e-move, meaning that emotions are movements, impulses, life forces, that if we allow ourselves to experience and feel, we will discover that they have great benefits. We usually classify them as good or bad, we reject them and prevent them from expressing themselves naturally.

What is Important to Know About Emotions?

• All emotions appear to be experienced, to feel them with and within our body.
• The movement of each of the emotions has a meaning.
• The basic emotions are: Sadness, Joy, Anger, Disgust, Surprise and Fear.
• Emotions are not positive or negative, good or bad. All emotions are necessary and if we allow us to experience them, instead of rejecting them, we will discover that they have a beneficial effect on ourselves and on all the people who are part of our lives.
• There are some basic emotions to which each human being responds differently, based on their own past experiences, which are memories; and based on our individual expectations, on what we imagine about the future.
• We adults tend to intellectualize them and we block them, reject them or inhibit them, because we believe that we should not feel them, eg. In society there is a belief that we should always be happy and that it is not okay to feel sad.
• By rejecting emotions and not experiencing them, we suffer and we make our body sick.
• Emotions are changing, fluctuating.

What is The Meaning, The Movement or The Impulse of Emotions?

Based on the practical and wise knowledge of Dr. Santiago Rojas on emotions, I share some ideas about the meaning of basic emotions:

• Sadness has an inward movement, it leads us to connect with our inner world and to know ourselves, to realize what we want or what kind of emptiness we have.
• Joy has an outward movement, it expands us, invites us to fully embrace what is happening. Anger is a movement that drives us to act. Ex: rage at something unfair. If we experience it or relate to it appropriately, it will not lead us to attack the other or ourselves, we will not create resentment.
• Disgust is a movement that leads us to rejection, to take distance.
• Surprise makes us stop, it creates a pause and invites us to discover, to learn something new and to focus our attention in the present moment.
• Fear connects us with the act of taking care. Taking care of ourselves and/or other, it can also drive us to fight or run away.

What Happens When We Reject, Ignore Emotions or on the Contrary We Attach to Them?

We spend a large part of each day and of our lives thinking rather than feeling. As human beings, we are very used to conceptualize or intellectualize what we feel. We tend to bring the attention to our thoughts and to the intellect. From the perspective of the intellect we say: “I don’t want to feel, I don’t like it”, or “I do want to feel this”. Nevertheless, to allow emotions to flow and to be able to interact with them in a healthy and appropriate way, we should practice to feel more than just thinking.

• By not wanting to feel, we are creating a resistance, a rejection of an emotion and this generates tension or unconscious disconfort in our body.
• Likewise, we are creating consciously or unconsciously an attachment to those emotions that the mind classifies as good. By “good”, it is understood that they are those emotions that we want, we desire or we like to feel. Wanting to feel only certain emotions automatically leads us to reject others. In other words, we are creating a dynamic of attachment and rejection towards emotions, which generates tension in us and does not allow us to flow with them in a more natural way.
• Tensions generate emotional and physiological stress that make our body sick and negatively affect our mental and emotional health.
• Emotions are movements of changing, fluctuating energy. This means that they need to flow, they have a beginning, a middle and an end. But if we hinder their development, their cycle, they stagnate and generate disease.
• The cycle, development of an emotion is short when we allow ourselves to feel them and let them go, we release them, we do not get attached to them.
• Dr. Jan Klein, considers that “to feel the body is to heal it”. For example, if we breathe slowly, gently and deeply, while we bring our attention to feel; example, to feel the head, the brain, the eyes, the neck, the back, the shoulders, the internal organs… our body relaxes.

How to Interact or Relate in an Appropriate and Healthy Way with Emotions?

According to Master Sifu Rama, there are three steps in Chi-Kung that allow us to interact or relate to emotions in a harmonious, healthy and appropriate way. The three steps must be done one after the other and the developemt of each step/excersice should be accompanied by slow abdominal breathing. Feel, the first step, should be done at the same time of inhaling slowly, deeply and gently through the nose. The Second and the Third: Release and Smile, are done practically together with a slow and easy exhalation of the air.

First Step: Feeling

• It is important to learn to bring our attention to explore our feelings. By doing this, we can awaken and exercise our ability to feel through the body.
• It is useful to ask yourself: How am I feeling? How is my body feeling? By asking and answering those questions I am reconnecting with my body and more specifically with the feeling of my body.
• The reconnection with Feeling, allows the thoughts, the mind, to begin to calm down, to pause for a moment. Feeling, the first step, is very important to generate the second one, Letting go.

Second Step: Letting go

• Letting go means allowing ourselves to release the emotion.
• Letting go is not keeping the attention focused on any thought. Neither is being attached to any emotion.
• By letting go, we don’t stay in the intellect, rationalizing, justifying or prolonging sadness, anger, fear, joy, etc. Neither we are attaching to the desire or need to continue feeling a specific emotion forever. Letting go, connects us with our ability to love everything we feel, without preferences, without values or judgments. But instead, the invitations is about recognizing the emotion and letting it go.

Third Step: Smile

• Smiling allows us to access to a vital force that is within each of us.
• Smiling connects us with the heart and at the same time allows us to activate it.
• By smiling we can bring to our mind a memory, an experience, a landscape, a person that we love and/or that brings us peace. With this, we will help create a connection between the brain and the heart, and we will experience a feeling of well-being.