It is easy not to share the real person – to resort to more superficial banter and avoid how we really feel. We all have a fairly predictable emotional landscape, a behaviour pattern which formed through our childhood. This shows us which feelings rattle us, which we try to avoid, and those we try to generate more of. In this way we often rely on past feelings to try to manage our present emotional framework. Pervasive emotional preferences like fear, anger and despair may grow and over time will be reflected in our faces and bodies. Continue reading Levels of Learning to Love – Sharing Emotions
Category Archives: Emotional Awareness
Learning to Know Ourselves
Facing what we find when the tide goes out
With so much information available to us now at the touch of a button, it’s easy to think that ‘we know.’ This attitude will actually jam our whole process of relating. Much of what we know of ourselves was what we were told; it was learnt behaviour. And if we stop and look at our relational patterns, we can see what ways we’ve been taught. We can affirm and continue in those patterns or we can choose to change them. It’s like we’ve been given a room to live in which is full of another person’s taste in furnishings. We can leave it as it is for security’s sake or we can make it our own while keeping some of the things that are ‘us’. Continue reading Learning to Know Ourselves
Our Emotional Landscape
Physically representing emotions that we carry from our earliest childhood can be helpful. For example, we could choose an object to illustrate our struggles or draw our early emotional dynamics. Then we are able to see our inner landscape.
By receiving our emotions, by re-feeling the feeling, we better understand what has created our own unique emotional landscape. We often think our feelings come from someone or something ‘out there’, but those situations are simply mirroring back to us what is going on inside.