The Energy of Emotions

How Mindfulness and Emotional Awareness Helps You and Your Family

You must have heard of the "trends" on Mindfulness meditation and what is called Emotional Intelligence in our society. Human beings are wonderful creatures of the universe: we are able to move in a space, think about a solution, smell a flower, and write on a paper, doing all those actions sometimes in a matter of seconds. It is the same concerning our emotions, from moment to moment we can shift from extremely relaxed to very upset, to sadness in a matter of seconds. Why is that so? And why those "trends" are actually very beneficial skills for the future of our children and communities.

I want to present the work of Daniel Goleman. He first started to work on research about  meditation (his first book: The Varieties of Meditative Experience (1977), republished as The Meditative Mind in 1988), where he studied the different kind of meditation and mindfulness techniques across the world, and discovered that it helped develop the skill of attention and concentration.

{Wikipedia: “These included Sufism, Transcendental Meditation, Patanjali's Ashtanga Yoga, Indian Tantra and Kundalini Yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, Zen, the teachings of Gurdjieff, and the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti. He wrote that "the need for the meditator to retrain his attention, whether through concentration or mindfulness, is the single invariant ingredient in the recipe for altering consciousness of every meditation system" (p. 107). Noting that most methods of meditation were intended to foster concentration, he also wrote that "powerful concentration amplifies the effectiveness of any kind of activity" (p. 169).}

Daniel Goleman then introduced his book “Emotional Intelligence” in 1995 were is explaining the importance of emotions and feeling, and developed programs concerning it in the corporate world and school systems (Social Emotional Learning). Today, there are many different organisations as Mindfulness Without Borders introducing this programs into schools, college, high schools – along with mindfulness techniques – to increase concentration and emotional management for the children, teenagers, but also for the teachers and administrators.

You can read on the website of http://www.aboutourkids.org a full and detailed article on Multiple intelligence and Social Emotional Learning

{Goleman's work teaches us that children's emotional and social skills can be cultivated, so that the child will accrue both short-term and long-term advantages in regard to well-being, performance and success in life. He outlines five crucial emotional competencies basic to social and emotional learning:

1. Self and other awareness: understanding and identifying feelings; knowing when one's feelings shift; understanding the difference between thinking, feeling and acting; and understanding that one's actions have consequences in terms of others' feelings.
2. Mood management: handling and managing difficult feelings; controlling impulses; and handling anger constructively
3. Self-motivation: being able to set goals and persevere towards them with optimism and hope, even in the face of setbacks
4. Empathy: being able to put yourself "in someone else's shoes" both cognitively and affectively; being able to take someone's perspective; being able to show that you care
5. Management of relationships: making friends, handling friendships; resolving conflicts; cooperating; collaborative learning and other social skills

The mastery of these five competencies results in enhanced emotional intelligence.}

Why is it important?

Well we are alive, moving, and thinking because of the energy within us, and all beings follow this trait of universal creation.

How can we know that for sure? Well I know and you know that we need food, water and sun to be operational, or in good health. And science introduced us to the all macro worlds that we cannot be ignore anymore. We are composed of parts and of small tiny cells called neurons, electrons and cells and much much more.

When you can see the activity in the brain of a human being, you can see neurons firing electricity to pass information. At the body level and everyday interactions, it is the same with external information: emotions feelings, senses communication.

We interconnect in any situations through waves of energy. And those waves can be weak or strong depending on the situations and our perceptions on the situation.

If I take two strong emotions examples (that may resonate with your life experiences):

When you love and care deeply for someone (for your boyfriend / husband – girlfriend / wife), you are very sensitive to their gestures and the words the person will use to communicate with you, you can become very reactive and emotional because you care some much for them. You can pass from ecstatically joyful to extremely worried.

It happens as well in relationship between parents and children, from one minute to the other going from very happy to anger, sadness and irritation.

Children are very emotional especially in the early years (after they learn to protect themselves like their adults role models, and know better how to react depending of the situation (fight, flight or freeze processes), they can sense the emotions of the parents and they act on it. They feel your stress, your joy, your irritation and because they don’t know yet how to react to it often they do the contrary of what is expected from them.

Another good example as extreme emotion will be anger. Have you ever experienced being in a crowd, during a protest, it usually go against something so a lot of anger and resentment are manifesting during those events. And if the crowd follows any negative and angry impulse, it becomes quickly very violent.

That is because of emotional “unawareness” – if I may say – we actually react to situations.

We usually react positively , if everything is going smooth and like we want it to be; and we react negatively if the situation is not going our way, we then react aggressively through anger, irritation, sadness...etc.

And sometimes completely out of control emotionally, if “we lost it” in the situation then we overact, we become depressed, irrational, overwhelmed.

But using techniques and skills like mindfulness (to develop concentration, attention and intention) emotional awareness, we start to observe how the emotions rise during a certain situation as well as how hour train of thoughts make us reactive. We learn to observe and respond to it in a constructive way. Instead of creating conflicts and aggressive responses, we are able to try to understand the other person point of view and solve it by finding a mutual respectful ground.

It is lots of work and practice to unravel our old emotional habits, but it is worth it to build peace in our household, communities and countries.

We can do it! 

Em.