Saturday, June 28, 2008

Intense or recurring emotions


Just as an action film or a romantic comedy takes you on a rollercoaster ride of emotions, so the dramas your mind keeps spinning out evoke their own play of feelings. If you’re trying to figure out how to make a killing in the stock market, for example, or ask out that attractive man or woman you just met at work, you may feel fear or anxiety or possibly excitement or lust. If you’re obsessing about the injustices or unkindnesses you suffered recently, you may experience sadness, grief, outrage, or resentment. Together with these emotions, of course, go a range of bodily sensations, including tension, arousal, contraction in the heart, or waves of energy in the belly or the back of the head. Some of these feelings may be pleasurable, others unpleasant or even painful. But emotions in themselves don’t pose a problem. It’s just that as long as you keep reacting to the dramas inside your head, you may be cutting yourself off from others and from deeper, more satisfying dimensions of your being —and you may miss what’s really going on around you as well.

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