In The Flow Or Repressed?

Over the past few years since I started my blog I have written about mental and emotional health. My work takes me down this path often as I try to assist others in finding their way to a clearer more peaceful mind and to a place of healthy awareness about emotions. Lately the clients I work with have been riding a roller coaster of emotions and they struggle with being out of control in their lives. The times we live in are full of stressful situations that may cause imbalances in our thinking and how we feel. The biggest triggers to send us off course in life are thoughts that don’t work and emotions that we feel unable to deal with in a healthy manner. Let me share another perspective about the workings of our mind and the waves of our emotions.

First place almost all emotions begin as thoughts. Yes often we do have lots of emotions stuffed inside (from not expressing them) but what triggers those emotions are thoughts. So let’s say a situation we find ourselves in causes us to have thoughts in response to that situation which then creates emotions in response to those thoughts. That is how we humans are wired.

So if we are in a situation that makes us uncomfortable like driving in a slow traffic mess, we can have a thought that this traffic jam is not fair and our emotions can flair up into anger. We have all been there. This anger is a response to our thought about the mess we are in. If our response was different and instead we thought of gratitude for this traffic mess because it gave us time to listen to this book on CD we got at the library then our emotions would be quite different. How we think about the situations we find ourselves in directly influences how we feel about it. That makes sense doesn’t it?

Emotions are powerful rivers of energy and aliveness that flow through us if we haven’t damned ourselves all up with our repressive thoughts. Any thoughts that say certain emotions are not acceptable to feel cause us to stuff what we feel. The more stuffing of feelings we do, the more we close down our aliveness. Unexpressed emotions eat away at us and many think are the cause of much disease. The least stuffing does is make us feel numb. Stuffing is ok for turkeys but not ok for humans.

The healthiest way for us to be mentally and emotionally is to be watchful of your thoughts and make sure they are positive, supportive and not reactive. If our thoughts stay calm and cool our emotions will be similar. Emotions that are acknowledged from within tend to keep us feeling alive and healthy. Even the negative charges some emotions carry are quickly dissipated by our paying attention to them in a validating way.

In summary, healthy thoughts encourage things to work out well in our lives and healthy emotions are those we feel fully and express and then move on.