Practically emotional


"Wizard's Third Rule - Passion rules reason."
— Terry Goodkind

Here's one of those practicals that I learned from long experience.

When I am tired or stressed, my emotional reactions get magnified.

Sometimes this is a good thing, a really good thing. A good time and a peak experience together can give you a bigger emotional kick.

Sometimes this is a really bad thing, it can make sadness and anger and depression worse.

Don't kid yourself. You are an emotional animal, a creature that lives on passion. Your body doesn't care if your emotion is "positive" or "negative," only the intensity matters. Just like you make orgone connections between you and the people and things you think of, you make connections between you and the emotions and sensations you feel. These emotional connections are reinforced by your ongoing experiences.

And that is where we get to me and my cross-wired brain. Take something simple like food. If I am having a really good time with friends that I trust, a hamburger doesn't just taste good, it tastes AMAZINGLY good. Then I crave hamburgers for months, and each time I remember that experience a little bit. But if I have just gotten slammed with bad news and I haven't shaken the mood before I eat, then the hamburger tastes bad and it's weeks before I can think about hamburgers without a gag reflex.

It can get worse. If I don't acknowledge how the food makes me feel and take steps, then I can get stuck in ruts of behavior where I'm not paying attention and I keep eating the food that makes me uncomfortable, reinforcing my bad mood and making me less likely to break out of it.

It's the peak experience, the highest highs and the lowest lows.

Now what I am about to tell you is an oversimplification, but it works. Negative emotions tend to be inwardly focused, positive emotions tend to be outwardly focused. The people you surround yourself with and how you touch them can control your emotional health. Bottle up all that emotion with no way to express it and it will just churn inside of you, ripping away your supports. Express that emotion, find a way to channel that passion into a beneficial touch in another's life, and the orgone flows through you into them making you both stronger.

Sometimes that means confronting your darker emotions. Sometimes that means finding a way to play. But it usually means touching someone else. Not necessarily sexually, although that can work very well.

That's what play is, you know. Learning to make those emotional connections in a way that lets passion flow instead of pooling inside you. Play, and you can learn something new faster. Play with someone else, you get better still. Humanity is a colony organism.

So if hamburgers make me sick, it's time to switch to bananas. You break the ruts of the negative behavior until you have a chance to channel the passion somewhere else.

You choose. You change. You make it better. The measure of a man is in the lives he touches.

Posted: Tue - September 8, 2009 at 12:40 PM
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