What is Emotion

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word, “emotion” as, “…any agitation or disturbance of mind, feeling, passion; any exciting mental state." Some theorists call the word a term; some say it denotes distinctive thoughts, psychological or biological states and a range of propensities to act.

The word “emotion” comes from the Latin verb "to move" with the prefix "e" to connote "move away".

I prefer to simplify the definition in one word, saying it is "energy". We are made of energy and so are emotions. Emotion is the energy that guides us to do everything we choose to do. It is our most powerful energetic device.

Think about it….Emotions can start war and they can start love. They can make us ill and they can make us healthy, and our history is the history of our emotions, as well as our own personal story!

What do you think emotions are? Normally we talk about the way we feel, but never talk about this important subject in depth, the way we should.

I don’t know anything that is more important in life than the way we feel. Isn’t it interesting how we take for granted important things in our lives every day?

Everything around us, including ourselves is energy and it must flow. Emotional energy flows just like light and electricity. It will allow us to experience the process of learning that we call life, deeply and truly. If we avoid it or resist to it, it will explode eventually, somehow.

Even though nature was created to help us, some of us control this wonderful tool, blocking this charge until we die…

Emotion produces motion and motion produces emotion.

Emotions are vital to our existence, and we cannot allow ourselves to detach from them. There are literally millions of people out there who feel almost dead inside literally afraid to feel anything for fear of getting hurt once again, in some way.

In most cases, it’s all about fear due to things that have happened in our lives while we were growing up. Sometimes it’s an existential fear, caused just by the fact that no one really knows the answers to why we’re here. Why were we born into the families we’re in? Why do we live in the city we live in, with the people we’re involved with, or in the circumstances in which we find ourselves?

It’s time to allow ourselves to feel what we’re meant to feel – our complete range of emotions. It’s a great experience if we allow them to be open; always remembering that fear is the opposite of faith. Where our faith is strong, there is no room for fear in our lives, and so, as we learn the process of trust, we learn to accept and honor our emotions the way it should be.

The majority of people prefer to “try” to detach from their emotions and to ignore them altogether. (Do you know what the word "try" means? To attempt to do something, or means a test of some sort, or an effort. It can also mean not getting to the expected result. This is no place to be. Either we do or we don’t do something!) This attempt at detachment results in the development of physical and emotional blocks. It literally causes dis-ease.

The word "disease" itself is made up of two parts: "dis" and "ease" – literally meaning "a lack of ease." That’s exactly what happens when we get sick. The part of the body that is ill is lacking in energy, caused by our blocking, or not being in touch with, our emotions, and our refusal to allow our energy to flow freely to all parts of our bodies. Some of the most common illnesses linked to this process are back pain, shoulder and neck pain, jaw pain, headaches, allergies, asthma, depression, phobias, chronic fatigue, and even cancer.

A good exercise is to write down the emotion that gives you the most trouble – meaning an emotion that is the hardest for you to handle, for whatever reason. Did you ever feel controlled by one of your emotions, instead of allowing it to be expressed easily?

Whatever it is – anger, fear, lust, happiness, or rage – write it down, with an explanation. After writing it, search for its roots in our childhood. Go into it with brutal honesty, for your own sake. Find out why you keep feeling the way you do, over and over throughout your life, and bring that same feeling into your present. Analyze and feel that emotion with full intent – don’t save anything. If you want to scream – go for it! If you want to cry – go for it! If you want to go wild go for it! Allow yourself to "feel" deeply for the first time, without any control in the least. As long as you don’t hurt yourself or another person, go for feeling full out.

Our most disturbing emotions are like a double-edged sword, they can either work for us or against us. They can be either our greatest friend or our worst enemy.

See how many of you can relate to this: You find someone you think you might want to be in a relationship with, which is not a strange thing in itself, right? To want to be in a relationship with someone else is a basic human need, correct? But how come many of us actually feel ourselves going into a cold sweat just at the prospect of even calling that person, in trying to tell them how we feel, or even just thinking about doing that?

How many of us create our own movie in our heads, projecting the worst possible outcome, before anything has even happened? Most of us are famous for doing that. Suddenly, in the space of a few seconds, we all become Steven Spielberg. We create scenarios, cast them, direct them, act them out and then we shoot the movie – and even worse – we believe it! We run this make-believe movie through our minds and we think it’s real.

I knew a lonely man, the kind of guy who could see an attractive woman standing across the street waiting for a bus, and before he even said, "Hello," in his mind he went through 30 years of marriage, and it ended badly. That’s called projection, and it’s what we tend to do.

It’s really all about fear. We project an outcome that is based in fear, and not in reality, because we are afraid to experience our true emotions. The funny thing is, until we learn how to own our emotions and the power that goes with them, this continues to happen throughout our lives, no matter how old we get. We make the same mistakes over and over again. There’s this great definition of the word "insanity" that I love. It says, "Insanity is doing the same things over and over again, always expecting different results."

How many of us can relate to that? We find certain patterns in our lives that seem to recur over and over again, and we think to ourselves, ‘How can this be happening to me again? What’s the matter with me? Won’t I ever learn?’ In order to break the pattern, we must learn about our emotions and how to handle them so that we own them, use them to guide us, use them as tools – not the other way around.

In order to change the outcome of events, we have to change how we think and what we do, and change is scary to a lot of people – just as scary as feeling our emotions. Just remember, if you keep on doing what you always did, you’ll keep on getting what you always got. Change is critical.