Many Emotions, Many Interpretations

Emotional health is emotional awareness.

Emotional health is body awareness.

Emotional health is understanding that emotions are energies that arise in the body.

Emotional health is having the awareness and capacity to feel these feelings in our body.

To improve our emotional health, we must improve our ability to feel, understand, and connect with our emotions.

We must fine-tune our ability to tap in and feel the subtle sensations of the body.

Feel the sensation rise in the body.

Extract the wealth of knowledge that comes from our intuitive, emotional body.

Extract the value of our human nature to support our mind/body/health.

We must learn how to let these energies release and move through us in a healthy way.

A very interesting thing happened as I was creating this post.

I found myself struggling to accurately illustrate the primary human emotions (anger, sadness, joy, love, fear).

I was reminded that emotions can only be read, felt, interpreted…. not created.

My goal in this post was to perfectly illustrate the 5 core human emotions (yes, some say there are six. Other research suggests there are only 4 or 8).

I was also reminded that there are an infinite amount of mixtures and textures of emotions.

No experience of emotion is the same.

Every expression of joy has its own unique flavor.

Back to the illustration process - my aim was to most accurately create an image of anger, but when I was done, I saw and felt a mix of disgust and agitation.

I shifted to draw the best drawing of joy.

I was left with a bubbling mess that felt more like hope.

I tried to create a squiggling line of sadness, but was left with what felt like a close relative - lowliness.

I was getting frustrated at my inability to correctly get these core emotions down on paper, but then it hit me… I was creating, not reading/feeling.

As soon as I shifted, it all flowed so much more beautifully.

I wasn’t getting stuck on love, but accepting and receiving the drawing that came out as infatuation.

Imagine you told yourself, “I want to be angry” or “I should be angry”…. then you wait… and you look down into yourself… and the anger is not there. Of course not.

We cannot create our emotions, we can only read and interpret.

Emotional health is the ability to read and interpret what is present and alive in us in this very moment

Emotional health is having the capacity to feel the complex web of emotions that arise in our system.

Emotional health is not needing to understand or label, but rather accepting and extracting the knowledge of energy and intuition.

Our prediction mechanism of the brain will always try to kick in and create, but your job is to kick it back and let the actual feelings rise and flow through.

This is emotional intelligence.

This is emotional health.