Emotions, teachers
Emotions are part of our physiology, of our nature. At the same time, they are mediated, experienced, interpretated also culturally. The complexity of emotions and the subjectivity of feelings have inspired many writers, scientists, teachers and more to explore the meaning of emotions, their related neuronal pathways, and complex expression in human communication. To me, the conscious and unconscious dimensions of emotions are also doorways into a level of our beingness that is both deeply human and deeply animal. Or, should I say, ecological. Through our (always developing) understanding of the emotional level of life, we learn to connect with (the evolution of) our body, with our needs, values, and overall experience of being an integral part of the whole we find quite hard to wrap our head around. Our heart, our stomach, our whole body ‘knows’ this, and it is our challenge to tune into this wisdom with care and curiosity. We lean into the experience of being a profoundly social being, including all the vulnerabilities. Even more so, our emotional life is the context in which our life has any meaning at all:
“Stripped of affect, human relationships become meaningless, albeit theoretically tractable (e.g. Heider, 1958). The age-old problems of […] value judgments cannot be solved if the emotions […] are not brought into the picture (Dąbrowski and Piechowski, 1970); similarly, when we try to penetrate the mystery of creativity and religious experience, both associated with rich affectivity, we cannot comprehend them without taking into account emotional development.”
Dabrowski, Multilevelness of emotional and cognitive functions, 1996
From this perspective, I have learned and am learning to appreciate and acknowledge the importance of our feeling-nature and the culturally diverse expressions of our ecology. This appreciation is in and of itself part of my emotional experience, the sometimes intense physiological and potentially embodied experience of emotions is bound up in a continuous dialogue with cognitive reappraisal. This fine-grained dance between cognition and emotion contributes to, facilitates, the co-creation of mind and heart, an internal co-regulation that is always also intensely embedded in the external milieu. The internal and external milieu we inhabit, our ecosystem. Our eco-emo-system, if you will. An appreciation of the emotional dimension of life can facilitate feelings of awe, wonder and humbleness. There is beauty in sadness, it teaches us to recognize values. At least partially, our relationship with our internal milieu is our doorway into an ecologically intelligent understanding of life. All of life is 'intelligence', and to me, one of the invitations we as human beings may experience is, through understanding, to respect our own and the 'whole' made of endlessly diverse forms of intelligence. This invitation may feel as if coming from a voice from within, what some people might also call “God within”, to name just one example. Meditation, the sky above us, gardening, contact with young children and the elderly, learning about the ecological intelligence of plants, animals, bodies and more, positively feeds into our ecological wisdom.
It is my sincere hope that we as a species learn how to (re-)value our social interconnectedness and our spiritually felt embeddedness in the whole we call nature, the whole that we ourselves also are. Including the vulnerabilities inherent in this majestic and certainly also often painful whole. Emotions come and emotions go, life longs to live, longs to transform – stay present with this subtle yet deep fact for more than a second. The sacredness of life is precisely this deep longing to live out its aliveness, emotions and feelings might be one of our most knowledgeable teachers in this matter.