Emotions Flow
February 27th 2007 05:53
It seems to me that our emotions are healthy. I can’t imagine a healthy person who doesn’t feel good. There are of course different aspects to health (physical, emotional, mental, spiritual and social is the way I see it) and so we may be healthy in one way but not others. Having said this though, I can’t imagine health as meaning that we are feeling bad.
So to be healthy to me means having a sense of resilience and ebullience. It is to feel up rather than down.
The problem with my thinking this way is, what about when we do feel down? Does being healthy mean never feeling sad or depressed? And for me the answer is, “Of course not”.
All our emotions make up a healthy life. Our sadness brings us sensitivity and anger knowledge of what is important to us (we don’t get angry about what isn’t important to us). Someone without fear may well have a shorter life than someone who is attentive to this signal of danger.
So all our emotions are valuable (even the one’s often regarded as negative: fear, anger, sadness and so on).
What effects our health is how we incorporate these emotions into our lives, how we respond to what we feel. The response will vary with the emotion (eg perhaps taking apart what makes us angry, perhaps leaving a dangerous situation). What will usually affect our health negatively is not being able to move on from an emotion. This may mean finding ways to resolve a past mistake or live with a trauma. Always feeling one emotion is a signal that something may be up – it is unlikely to be healthy. It may also be that we are still in a situation that is bad for us and that the situation, not us, needs to change.
Our emotions are healthy, they are valuable part of the flow of our lives. It seems likely to me that the feeling that goes with health is a kind of quiet joy – an elated calmness – close to a confidence that we can live happily where we are. This ‘feeling’ can be a kind of undercurrent, or in the background, even when we are feeling the other emotions. It is my guess that this is the feeling that goes with health.
So to be healthy to me means having a sense of resilience and ebullience. It is to feel up rather than down.
The problem with my thinking this way is, what about when we do feel down? Does being healthy mean never feeling sad or depressed? And for me the answer is, “Of course not”.
All our emotions make up a healthy life. Our sadness brings us sensitivity and anger knowledge of what is important to us (we don’t get angry about what isn’t important to us). Someone without fear may well have a shorter life than someone who is attentive to this signal of danger.
So all our emotions are valuable (even the one’s often regarded as negative: fear, anger, sadness and so on).
What effects our health is how we incorporate these emotions into our lives, how we respond to what we feel. The response will vary with the emotion (eg perhaps taking apart what makes us angry, perhaps leaving a dangerous situation). What will usually affect our health negatively is not being able to move on from an emotion. This may mean finding ways to resolve a past mistake or live with a trauma. Always feeling one emotion is a signal that something may be up – it is unlikely to be healthy. It may also be that we are still in a situation that is bad for us and that the situation, not us, needs to change.
Our emotions are healthy, they are valuable part of the flow of our lives. It seems likely to me that the feeling that goes with health is a kind of quiet joy – an elated calmness – close to a confidence that we can live happily where we are. This ‘feeling’ can be a kind of undercurrent, or in the background, even when we are feeling the other emotions. It is my guess that this is the feeling that goes with health.
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