I’ve come to see that emotional awareness — and even emotional “wisdom” — is an essential key to self-mastery, recovery from addiction, and maintaining healthy relationships.
But "emotional awareness" does not mean being emotional. It doesn't mean living by the whims of our feelings. It means that we value, understand, and deal with our emotions. This means that we accept and experience our emotions, rather than trying to suppress them. So far so good.
BUT ... by "understanding and accepting our emotions," I don’t mean that we submit to their whims.
This is one of the key emphases of Japanese psychology -- specifically a modality known as Morita Therapy. A core tenet of this therapy is that our emotions will come and go, and that we aren’t their slave. What matters
is what we DO, the actions we take. We periodically take actions even if we don’t “feel like it” ... and those actions are significant.
Greg Kretch is an American author and therapist who is one of the leading experts on — and advocates of — applying insights from
Japanese psychology into the problems we face in the Western world … especially Morita Therapy. I highly recommend his books. Here’s an excerpt from one them, entitled “The Art of Taking Action: Lessons from Japanese Psychology”:
“Feelings are sensations. The ability to tolerate sensations we’d rather not have is supremely important. Without such
tolerance, our lives remain needlessly vulnerable to our wild and fickle feelings, and our plans get needlessly derailed. Without such tolerance we can become preoccupied to an unhealthy degree with our private internal experience, and thereby become distracted from the world around us, the needs of others, and the tasks at hand. It is difficult to build our dreams without coexisting with the feelings that come up in the process of creating those dreams.
"Notice the feeling, recognize it for what it is, take a deep breath, and shift your energies to that which needs doing.”
