Now I Feel
Be aware of your emotional states and hone your ability to identify the emotions you feel.
emotions affect and are affected by the things we do throughout the day. They can be affected by daily and monthly cycles and the weather, so it’s good to know how we’re feeling at any given moment.
As powerful as emotions are in helping us understand ourselves and the world around us, our society has built taboos around them, especially for boys and men. If we hope to move forward as humans, we need to understand what we’re feeling and what those feelings mean.
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Our emotional state fluctuates frequently throughout the day, and is affected by all kinds of things including whether we’re hungry or tired or bored. Emotional states that are kind of at the background level are often called “moods,” while strong emotions that are in response to some event are called “emotional reactions,” but they’re all emotions.
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Naming emotions can be difficult at first, but it’s useful to have a list of emotional terms to start with. That’s the idea behind the kind of poster you often see in schools showing what are basically emojis with the word describing them below.
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Start with the big ones: happy, sad, angry, calm, agitated. Then you can work on the more subtle aspects between, say, being angry and being frustrated or being sad and being pensive.
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Visualization: Try visualizing your emotions as lighting and sounds in your personal universe. Imagine the center of your personal universe and associate your emotion with the color of the light. If you’re happy, the light might be yellow or blue; if you’re mad, it might be red. If you’re especially happy, there may be a disco ball spreading dots of light around the room and the sound of laughter in air. If you’re angry, you might hear thunder and see flashes of lightning.
Therefore:
Be aware of your emotional states and hone your ability to identify the emotions you feel.
Emotional awareness is part of Mindfulness as well as the practice of Inquiry