07 April 2010

Track your emotions and give them words is a complicated and also personal process. It is that the more, while the difference between emotions and feelings are also not quite clear. Even not for scientists. 'Googling' on 'definition of emotions' results in 9 million pages of information, and on 'a definition of feelings' into 13 million pages. In his book 'Feeling and Personhood, Psychology in Another Key' Saga publications 1992, John Heron gives the following explanation (page 16). 'By the term 'emotion' I mean the intense, localized affects that arises from the fulfilment or the frustration of individual needs and interests. This is the domain of joy, love, surprise, satisfaction, zest, fear, grief , anger and so on'.

And by the term feeling he refers, 'with special usage, to the capacity of the psyche to participate in wider unities of being, to become at one with the differential content of a whole field of experience, to indwell what is present through attunement and resonance, and to know its own distinctness while unified with the differentiated other.' And he explains that 'this is the domain of empathy, indwelling, participation, presence, resonance and such like'. Others like Lawrence Hyde, John writes, made a distinction between the more intense and agitated character of emotions and the creative aspect of feeling by which 'we place ourselves in communion with what we find outside ourselves'.

Though there is certainly quite a distinction between the two, it also is not that easy, that we need to feel ashamed by not observing that difference immediately in practice. Still, especially in practicing non violent communication, it is important to base your expressions on what is really going on inside. And not what is simply nothing more than 'a thought'. Which is quite close if not the same as a worded feeling. CCI is specified in monitoring what is going on inside. A quick check shows six seconds (http://www.6seconds.org) an USA non profit organization for bringing emotional intelligence into practice. On that site click 'free resources' and click on 'what am I feeling?' and start with clicking the face that shows the kind of feeling you have now. You have a choice between mad, glad, sad and scared. This so called 'Emotoscope' is also available on Facebook. It is just to try out!

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