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Quotes about Emotion

    “This being human is a guest house. Every morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor… Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. The dark though, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”

    Rumi, via The Body Keeps The Score (Page 279)

      “Desensitization to our own or to other people’s pain tends to lead to an overall blunting of emotional sensitivity.”

      Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 224)

        “Emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to experiences and thus are the foundation of reason. Our self-experience is the product of the balance between our rational and our emotional brains. When these two systems are in balance, we ‘feel like ourselves.’ However, when our survival is at stake, these systems can function relatively independently.”

        Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 64)

          “The moment we find ourselves feeling bored, sad, anxious or complacent we reach for our phones, a prescription or a self-help book. We’ve become terrified of feeling anything negative. I’m not going to point a finger, but if someone held a gun to my head and told me to point a finger, I’d point to Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. I’d say we were due. I’d say that when you have an entire society overly focused on sharing the upper 1% of their days in a virtual world 24/7, we were bound to create some deep-rooted fears and insecurities around negative emotions. Now, we are forced to reap what we have sown.”

          Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 64)

            “Consider the difference between saying ‘I am sad’ and ‘I feel sad.’ Similar as those two statements may seem, there is actually a profound difference between them. ‘I am sad’ is a kind of self-definition, and a very limiting one. ‘I feel sad’ suggests the ability to recognize and acknowledge a feeling, without being consumed by it. The focusing skills that are part of mindsight make it possible to see what is inside, to accept it, and in the accepting to let it go, and, finally, to transform it.”

            Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight

              “Happiness is your natural state. That means you will return to it on your own if you allow the other feelings you want to experience to come up, be felt, be processed, and not resisted. The less you resist your unhappiness, the happier you will be. It is often just trying too hard to feel one certain way that sets us up for failure.”

              Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 231)