Many of us have (often involuntarily) learned to suppress our feelings and emotions to deal with the people and situations life throws at us. I, for example, can become particularly ‘cold’ in situations where my emotions or others’ run high.
While it can occasionally serve as a useful ‘survival mechanism,’ suppressing our feelings and emotions will inhibit our ability to find out who we are, and what we need to live a fulfilling life. Therefor, we need to develop a healthier way of ‘dealing with’ whatever feelings arise in us, which is often simply referred to as enhancing our ’emotional intelligence.’
In this post, I will set the stage for a recurring segment in my ‘bits & pieces’ blog. It is basically an exercise that combines the creative with the emotional, which I think constitute an immensely powerful marriage for connecting with the things we feel inside.
Identify the feeling
To do the exercise, you can think back to a moment or situation where you strongly felt a particular emotion, or try to assess however you are feeling right now.
Experience the feeling through words
Then, on a blank sheet of paper, describe the feeling using only words. Be as elaborate as you can, using analogies, metaphors, names… whatever helps you get a clearer view of what it is that you feel from inside. Make it a story, carrying you through the landscape of whatever it is that you experience.
Here are a few lines on what I felt this morning:
…A feeling that my body is standing up and my mind preparing for a new situation. In the future I am already doing the things of which I am still waiting to discover their necessity. No music can calm me, no words that can soothe—as soon as it’s played, before they are uttered. They are chasing me, trying to strangle my feet. But I cannot be caught, not in this dimension. There’s no passing, no ‘going’ allowed. Trying is futile, only slowing me down, from doing the things I’m telling myself I should do…
The feeling I was having was a kind of restlessness because I got up late but had many things I wanted to do (and people that were counting on me).
The goal is not to explain the feeling to someone else but to yourself. So as long as it makes sense to you, you are on the right track.
As you may have observed, I like to let things ‘flow.’ I guess you could say it is a bit like poetry; the words carry you around an idea, rather than describing it objectively. Doing this will open you up, allow you to feel. This is because when we want to be ‘correct,’ our brain goes into ‘reviewer mode,’ shutting down the connection we are trying to explore. When we allow ourselves to be creative, we give our brain permission to sit back so that it does not intervene.
By putting our feelings into words, we learn to observe them. Rather than being overwhelmed we become accustomed to some kind of light and warm curiosity. In the words of Robin Hobb:
“Naming things gives us power over them, like possession. We can know things better, we can understand them better, by putting them into words.”
Robin Hobb
Experience the feeling through vision
Tapping into this same power combining the unconstrained flow of creativity as a mechanism to access our emotions, and advancing our capacity to observe our emotions, the final step in this exercise is to visualize what we experience.
Here too, whatever form of expression suits you is allowed. You can try to visualize your experienced feeling through a collage of digital images, pencil-drawing, or painting. You can use shapes, colours, intensity, edges, whatever flows, to express what you are feeling.
Again, there is no good or bad. When your brain steps in with “this is ugly” or “this makes no sense,” take a moment to recognise what you are doing. It is not about the end-result, it is about the journey you experience to arrive there.
I feel that the visual aspect of the exercise is sometimes a bit harder than the ‘written word.’ However, you should now have a rich base of words from which to draw inspiration in order to start!
Below, I’ve included an AI-generate image, based purely on my own text I shared before.
Doing the exercise once a week, for example at the very start of your weekend, will help you not only to understand the emotions you’ve assessed, but also to develop the skill of assessing emotions more generally. Indeed, creativity (or art) is a powerful way to grow our emotional intelligence:
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
Thomas Merton
My personal feeling profiles:
