just passin' through

It is probably fair to say that a lack of emotional intelligence on the part of... you know, most people, is a big part of this world's problem. Emotional Intelligence is essentially the ability to understand the emotions we are feeling and have them inform us, as opposed to control us. The first part of understanding the emotions is to simply notice them. I am finding that our -- my, anyway -- emotional experience is much broader and deeper than I ever imagined. If I settle in and let my awareness expand into my body and simply pay attention to what I am feeling, I find that there is a lot going on in there! While I am happily listening to music, I might check in and find that I am also experiencing some sadness about something and some excitement about something else. As I have some sort of experience interacting with other(s), I can unpack my emotions and find 5, 6, even more than 10 discrete emotions going on. I assume that this is not only true for me.

Once I notice the emotions, or at least the most prominent few at a given time, the emotionally intelligent thing to do is to consider the emotions along with other available data and decide my behavior accordingly. If the emotions I feel are strong, my mind often feels a pull to act out in some way that scratches the itch my emotions rile up. If I am feeling hurt, I want to make the pain go away and/or hurt someone back and/or run away and/or something else and so on. At this point, many people either indulge in this emotionally-motivated behavior, usually with less than optimal impact, or find some way to stifle the emotions so that they aren't presently so painful. Others might go through some form of "wound worship", such that individual overly identifies him or herself with the emotions. This person is not a person who is feeling pain, it is a person who believes, on some level, that their pain is who they are.

Another key issue with respect to our emotional lives is the existence of unexpressed or repressed emotions. (I'll toss you a disclaimer here, by the way, that I am not a psychologist. What I am writing here could conceivably fly in the face of what modern science believes. If that is the case, I suspect the contrast between the two is one of language and interpretation. In short, I am convinced that these opinions have value -- whether or not they co-exist peacefully with conventional wisdom.) When we have powerful, emotionally resonant experiences, but somehow close our mind to allowing the exprience to fully affect us, we create a sort of emotional blockage or constriction. This is usually an experience that our conscious mind can apprehend, but often does not -- due in part to a conscious or non-conscious dismissal of the existence or validity of the emotions. So, we repress -- constrict the experience -- of emotion so completely that our intellect can effectively claim ignorance. There is a really big problem here. When we don't express an emotion, it kind of stays with us, impacting our mind and our on-going experience in some subtle and some not so subtle ways. Repressed emotions seem to be invoked when those same emotions are evoked by events in our life. When this is happening with me, I get a form of tunnel vision that leads to me essentially only see information that relates to the underscoring emotion. For example, if my not-expressed emotion is anger, and something makes me angry in my life, I find that I have more anger in me than seems appropriate to the events in my life. If I don't maneuver through these emotions carefully, I may find that I have just added another layer of repressed emotion. You can see how this can snowball into serious emotional problems and lots of bad habits around whatever the types of events in our lives that triggered this emotional experience. If, on the other hand, I acknowledge the emotions -- from the past and the present -- and hold them lightly while still being open to the impact thay have on my mind and my behavior, then I do not let them control me.

So, I just finished writing the above and I find that I am not liking this installment so much. I am lecturing here, and that is not what I want. Its ok, though, because I am happy to sit with my emotions that arise when I don't do the quality work I want to do.