The BOLD (I Feel You)
Our emotions are always present. We are told that we need to leave our emotions at the door in order to be professional. The vast majority of us have a habit of apologizing when we cry or show a depth of emotion in a public setting.
The reality is that our emotions weigh in on our every decision and inform our every move. They influence our mindset, our choices and our actions. Why, then, do we tend to ignore them?
We’re going to investigate the link between the body and our emotions. How do you even know what emotion you are feeling? The body tells us. By paying attention to the signs and sensations, we can better access the wisdom our emotions want to bring.
The Whisper (Where Emotion Lives)
“Why,” you think as you punch the accelerator to dart around the annoying driver in front of you, “is the traffic so irritating today?”
Why, indeed. Why, you might instead ask, are you forgetting that ten minutes ago your progress out of the office was interrupted by a demanding, brusque client’s phone call? Or perhaps your business partner did that ritual of finger drumming that always sets your teeth. Or could it have been that you noticed, just as you settled into the driver’s seat, that the gas was on fumes because your son/husband/wife/daughter/roommate had borrowed the car and left it empty?
The irritation with which you received the mildly slow, somewhat inconvenient driver was probably out of proportion to the stimulus. You were already irritated and your frustration prompted you to scan for other evidence that the world’s card deck was stacked against you.
How do you feel when you are irritated? (And no, “irritated” is not a sufficient answer to that question for the purposes of this exploration.) What happens in your body when you feel irritated, frustrated, angry and put-upon?
Look at those scenarios above. Do any of them seem familiar? If not, think of a time recently when you were pushed to the limits of your patience.
Now, what did that feel like? How did you know that you were irritated?
For me, irritation shows up as a tight, yet at the same time, swirly feeling in my lower gut. There is a fluttery warmth at the top of my neck just beneath my ear lobes and there is pressure in my temples.
I feel a desire to scream and release the tension or to, perhaps, inspire more vigorous action from the subject of my frustration. I feel an antsy impatience to move and act.
It is as though I can feel my capacity for patient action flowing out of me.
If I’m in that state (and I’m not already irritated with you) you could ask me what I am feeling and I probably have a 75% chance of replying that I’m irritated. There are times, however, where the irritation takes hold and I am so inspired to frantic action that I don’t have the capacity to identify the emotion that is driving me.
That can be a big problem. Imagine that I’m irritated to the point of recklessness and I’m confronted with an innocent bystander, perhaps a child or a kitten. My treatment of them might not cause me to feel a swelling of pride upon later analysis.
On principle, I want to be nice to children and kittens.
By learning to identify the physical sensations that accompany our emotions, we can gain access to a powerful tool for understanding our current state. By understanding our current state, we can begin to take action to shift it if it is not pointing us in the direction we would like to go.
Consider the following emotions. For each one, can you think of a time recently when you felt that emotion? What was the stimulus that sparked the emotion? Then, try to remember how it felt in your body when you were experiencing that emotion:
- Sadness
- Excitement
- Frustration
- Anger
- Anticipation
- Bashfulness
- Awe
- Boredom
- Doubt
- Envy
- Panic
- Peace
For a deeper exploration of emotions, I highly recommend the book The Unopened Gift: A Primer in Emotional Literacy by Dan Newby and Lucy Nunez. In this book, Dan includes a glossary of emotions with information about what happens when an emotion becomes rooted, about the story that comes with the emotion, about the way the emotion pre-disposes us to act, about the human concern underpinning the emotion and about related emotions.
We are told we must control our emotions. Perhaps, we do not need to control our emotions. What if we need to honor our emotions, let them visit, thank them for their contribution, and let them go so that we can control our response?
That level of control begins with the awareness that we are feeling an emotion in the first place.
Leave a Reply