“We are dangerous when we are not conscious of our responsibility for how we behave, think, and feel.”

Marshall B. Rosenberg

Emotions color human experience. They are the gateway through which life takes on so many colors.

Isadora Duncan, the trailblazing dancer and choreographer acclaimed as the mother of modern dance, said that to awaken human emotion is the highest level of art. Emotions are not evil or quarrelsome. They are the deepest expression of our humanity.

Even negative emotions are not bad. Be it regret, shame, sadness, or anger, these emotions are there to tell us something - firstly, that we cared deeply enough about something that it has hurt us, and secondly that we need to change something if we want to move forward into a happier, healthier life.

It’s okay to feel sadness when sadness is warranted.

It’s fine to feel anger when you suffer an injustice.

It’s normal to feel regret when you make a mistake.

The real difference arises with how we handle these emotions. If we let them rule us, if we are not even aware of what they’re doing - that is when we begin to lose the thread.

I think we’ve all experienced this. There have been times in my life when days would go by in a “funk”, yet in hindsight I see I lacked awareness. I didn’t know what I was feeling, just that I felt unhappy. I didn’t delve into it, understand its roots, or work towards rectifying the situation. Instead I just carried on, caught in the spirit of that mood, and though it did resolve I know I wasted time letting the unnamed emotions take me for a joyride.

That’s the thing. Emotions, and thoughts, are very real and very powerful. A “train of thought” is very much a train, whisking you away if you let it. The same goes for emotions. A rush of anger, or a creep of melancholy, can hijack you if you let it.

There are many ways to handle these emotions. All have the same keystone: awareness. Without awareness of what we’re feeling, how can we properly handle it? It’s like in riots. The whole thing about violent mobs is that they’ve lost their individual sense of awareness, falling into a collective fever. Know thyself indeed. Knowing is half the battle - and it’s a crucial battle, because how we manage our emotions impacts every aspect of our lives for better or for worse.

Cue Emotional Intelligence.

IQ used to be the hot topic. These days, I hear about EQ far more often. Emotional intelligence, that ability to recognize, name, understand, and regulate emotions - that is immensely valuable to the social creature that is the human being.

How many emotions can you name? Let’s try a few: Anger, Anxious, Belonging, Blame, Curious, Disappointed, Disgust, Embarrassment, Empathy, Excited, Fear, Scared, Frustrated, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happy, Humiliation, Hurt, Jealous, Joy, Judgment, Lonely, Love, Overwhelmed, Regret, Sad, Shame, Surprised, Vulnerability, Worried…

And the list goes on.

Is it any surprise that most people can’t tell which of those they’re feeling? Only that they feel good, bad, or sad?

We need to educate ourselves about ourselves, because we’re terribly myopic when it comes to emotions.

“My message for everyone is the same: that if we can learn to identify, express, and harness our feelings, even the most challenging ones, we can use those emotions to help us create positive, satisfying lives.” - Marc Brackett

Marc Brackett, founder of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and author of Permission to Feel (pretty high up on my to-read list), developed an approach called RULER. It’s a great example of one of the many approaches to handling your emotions, but before anything, you need to get this straight: it’s okay to feel whatever you’re feeling. Do not push it away. Once you give yourself that permission to feel, then you can get to work.

R - Recognition of emotions in oneself and others
U - Understanding the causes and consequences of emotions
L - Labeling emotions accurately
E - Expressing emotions appropriately
R - Regulating emotions effectively

How does one do the above? It differs for everyone. One of the ways I think about it is as a river. Your thoughts and emotions are the river, and you are on the riverbank. Your mind is a net cast into the river, collecting all those things flowing by. Most people never retract their nets - they let them fill up, bulge, until they burst with all those unchecked thoughts and emotions. The trick is to develop mindfulness and awareness, so when a thought or emotion arises, you can stop and identify it not as part of yourself but as something visiting you, because guess what?

You are not your thoughts.

You are not your emotions.

You are the one who experiences them.

When you catch yourself feeling or thinking, try to put a name to it. Don’t push it away. Instead, actively acknowledge it, because repressing emotions does more harm than good. Retract the myopic net of your mind and watch these experiences flow through you, not clinging to them, but not ignoring them either.

When sadness arrives, acknowledge it and seek to understand it.

When any emotion arrives, do the same.

Is it possible to do this all the time? Not at all, but just taking a few minutes each day, such as during a meditation session, can help you be more aware throughout the day, especially when a potent emotion arises. This isn’t about being all Zen-like all the time. It’s just about being a little more skilled with your own heart.

This reminds me an important lesson that’s always stuck with me since reading Man’s Search for Meaning. A lesson that Viktor Frankl, despite being trapped in the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, was able to use to maintain his hope and humanity.

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” - Viktor E. Frankl

No matter what happens, we have the power to choose our response. No matter what emotions arise, we have the ability to use them to our advantage rather than to our detriment. It’s a skill that must be nurtured, can be nurtured, and a joy when you come to realize how much better life is when you are in harmony with yourself.