Seventh Post in "tuesdays with Morrie" series: Emotions

Well, it's another post in the "tuesdays with Morrie" series. Mitch and Morrie are still working on figuring out life, and they are going to discuss emotions next.

The Sixth Tuesday: We Talk About Emotions
Regarding Detaching:
"'Take any emotion - love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions - if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them - you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.'
'But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what the pain is. You know what love is.  You know what grief is. And only then can you say, 'All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from the emotion for a moment...now I'm going to put that [emotion] aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and I'm going to experience them as well''" (Pg. 103-105).

I think that this is a very important message. Personally, I sometimes fight an emotion because I want to be able to detach from it; I don't have the energy or the time to feel the emotion so I try to block it out. However, this quote makes me realize that maybe my approach has been wrong. Maybe I need to feel the emotion, recognize it, and then detach from it.

I love the statement that we have the control to tell ourselves that there are other emotions to feel. Isn't that a liberating thought? We can say, "Ok. I'm feeling grief. I know I'm going to feel it again. I know I'm going to be sad from this emotion again, but I'm going to choose to feel happiness right now because there are other emotions in the world than grief."

How are you at recognizing an emotion? Do you allow the emotion to fully show itself to you before detaching or do you try to block the emotion from coming in at all in an effort to detach from it?


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