Seeing with the Heart

... and befriending your emotions

Happy Easter to those of you celebrating. Last week, I asked you to see yourself clearly; a vulnerable proposition. We are complex creatures, containing multitudes. It’s a lot easier to see our flaws and imperfections than our gifts. I hope that you were able to celebrate a little bit of your genius, your inner artist. 

There’s an important aspect to seeing yourself clearly that we haven’t touched on yet, and that has to do with emotions, or seeing with the heart. Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence, exploded onto the scene back in 2005. He defined emotional intelligence, arguing that it was as important as any other form of intelligence with regards to how you navigate life. 

“Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth." ~ Daniel Goleman

Emotions are the body’s regulator. They’re associated with nerve receptors in your internal organs, bones, muscles and skin. These receptors send information to the brain which then uses this information to determine how you feel. The purpose of the emotional system is to help your body stay in a state of balance. Emotions come and go; they quite naturally flow through the body in about 90 seconds if we let them. If we don’t, they can get blocked and affect us physically and mentally. 

The book that has helped me understand and accept my emotions the most came out a few years after Goleman’s - The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren. In a recent email, McLaren wrote that studies now show that emotions are central to basic cognition, the foundation of rationality.

“Your emotions are vital to everything you think and do. Emotions exist to help us survive and navigate our way through life. They are fluid, ever-changing, and extremely versatile. Emotions move, and they carry massive amounts of information. They’re often deeply perceptive (if sometimes painfully so) and profoundly healing, as long as we approach them correctly, interpret them honorably, and treat them with respect. ” ~ Karla MacLaren, The Language of Emotions

We tend to label emotions as positive or negative, yet all emotions are helpful in that they contain important messages. Recognizing how our emotions affect us enables us to see more clearly and act according to the messages they’re conveying.

The Visual World

One way to start noticing emotions in your everyday life is to see how you respond to the visual world around you. We’re impacted emotionally (and often subconsciously) by the way things look - through colours, lines, symmetry or asymmetry, balance, and juxtaposition.

I’ve noticed that in the winter, I long for colour. After days of grey, a dose of colour can light me up. Everyone has different colour associations, depending on past experiences. Green makes me feel clear and fresh, yellow feels free and energetic, blue feels like cool strength and power. 

Advertising, websites, and even memes take advantage of the emotional aspects of design to sway our views and actions. In his book on Emotional Design, Don Norman identifies three cognitive levels related to visual design that affect us emotionally.

1. Visceral level - a preconscious reaction, felt strongly in the body. It often arises from a first impression, whether of something surprising or beautiful or disturbing, and experienced as a jolt.  

2. Behavioral level - is an aesthetic reaction to how things look, whether something is visually appealing or not. You might react emotionally to colour, light, lines, shapes, etc. There are universal designs in nature that are inherently appealing, like spirals. 

3. Reflective level - is about how we interpret and understand things. It is the overall impression or the meaning we give to something we see. Metaphor and symbolism may play a part. This is our story, based on past experiences, and may have an emotional component. 

You can practice noticing how things affect you at these different levels by paying attention to your likes and dislikes or seeing where your attention goes and how you react to what you’re seeing.

Numbing Emotions

Some emotions are not easy to bear and we can dissociate from them or numb them in unhealthy ways. 

“The anesthetic drugs and practices—painkillers, cigarettes, heroin, marijuana, excessive reading or TV and movie viewing, and overeating—help numb the body, the emotions, and the thoughts so that part of us can live in peace and quiet.” ~ Karla McLaren, The Language of Emotions

We all do this in varying ways and when we do the emotions may get stuck or keep repeating until we get the message. McLaren says that sadness is about something that needs to be released and fear has to do with something that needs to change. When you recognize this happening, you can change the behaviour, but you may need outside help to do so. 

We’ve all gone through a huge past year, each of us affected in different ways. I’ll bet that many different emotions have surfaced. I’ve noticed in myself an underlying sense of anxiety and sadness that comes and goes. When I notice this happening, I can go and take a walk, letting it flow or I can write or talk about it with someone. 

Lisa Feldman-Barrett, who studies how emotions arise, says that we can’t choose what we feel but that we have more control over our emotions than we think. We can nurture stress-reducing practices and we can choose to pay attention to our emotions and heed what they have to say. Developing a healthy respect and relationship with your emotions can help you to navigate difficult times. 

Practice

Increasing your emotional intelligence is an ongoing, lifelong process. For this week, we’ll practice seeing with the heart. If you’re a meditator, you know how to bring awareness to the thoughts in your mind and your physical senses. You can also move awareness from the mind to the heart. Visualize this movement and put your hand over your heart. Practice this at different times throughout the week and notice if this opens up greater awareness of your emotions in the moment. 

Here are a few other options to explore.

Take a look at Karla McLaren’s Emotional Vocabulary page (a see Resources) and write down how you’re currently experiencing the major emotions - anger, fear, sadness, happiness, shame/guilt, and jealousy/envy. I did this exercise and found it to be enlightening. I could identify something I was currently experiencing in every category. Take it further and write about the messages these emotions have for you.

If you’re not accustomed to noticing emotions, this may be difficult. Start simply by recognizing little things that light you up or make you smile. What delights you today? When do you feel love or gratitude? When do you feel sad or angry? No judgments. Just feel the feeling and let it flow. What could these emotions be telling you?

Take note of emotional responses to the visual world in the present, like colour or lines or sound or beauty. Just notice. Are you having a visceral, behavioural, or reflective response? If you’re a photographer, write about a photograph that evokes an emotional response in you. Here’s the pdf on emotions from A Visual Journal (an on-demand visual journaling workshop).

Sometimes you’ll notice that you’re feeling an emotion but it’s coming from your mind - a story from the past that’s nagging at you or even a pleasant memory. In this case, just stay with it, see if you can name it, and then let it flow. Bring your awareness back to the present. I’ve noticed that the same stories often play over and over in my head. 

If you’re feeling intense emotions and/or numbing them, be kind to yourself. Maybe you need some help in dealing with them. There’s nothing wrong with that. As a matter of fact, it might be one of the best things you do.

Resources

The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren

Karla MacLaren’s Emotional Vocabulary List

Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett