I've been knee deep in my coaching certification and came across the following from one of my classmates:
When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that's faith.
When facts change your mind, that's science.
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?
http://edge.org/q2008/q08_index.html
http://edge.org/q2008/q08_index.html
I've changed my mind about emotions. I've always viewed emotion as a bad thing. Something that should be suppressed. Every time tears welled up, I hated it. I would always say to myself, "What are you doing? This is stupid. Why are you crying? But I wouldn't wait to even hear my answer to these questions. It could be from my upbringing; My father is German/Scottish descent. My mother is Scotch/Irish descent. Those cultures by nature do not show much emotion outwardly compared to other cultures--maybe it has something to do with the cold environment of those countries. Who knows?!
Through my journey this past year, I've changed my mind and now am on the journey to embrace my emotions (all of them) and learn from them instead of suppressing them. It doesn't serve anyone else and it doesn't serve me.
The question that I ask is, "Why does the American Society, that I'm familiar with, want us to suppress our emotions? It's almost like society says, emotions aren't rational, which is true, but they go further to say that only rational things are important.
Through my journey this past year, I've changed my mind and now am on the journey to embrace my emotions (all of them) and learn from them instead of suppressing them. It doesn't serve anyone else and it doesn't serve me.
The question that I ask is, "Why does the American Society, that I'm familiar with, want us to suppress our emotions? It's almost like society says, emotions aren't rational, which is true, but they go further to say that only rational things are important.
If emotions are catalysts for action and we don't value emotions, then does that mean that we don't take action or we take action only if it's rational?
What impact does that have on the decisions that we make for action? What impact does that have on our gut feeling about things?
3 comments:
Check out this article in O Magazine:
http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/200802/omag_200802_ocut.jhtml
It's about the first western Buddhist nun and she also seeks to embrace all emotions and learn from them.
I read this article in my O Magazine after I posted this on Emotions. Isn't the universe funny! Thanks for sharing...
AMerica's most significant home-grown philosophy is pragmatism: "pragmatists consider practical consequences or real effects to be vital components of both meaning and truth." [WikiPedia] This tends to give primacy to logic and relegate emotion to the realms or error, noise, or distraction. Works great for building ships and cars, not so great for building a life.
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