Emotion and Us

I first got to know about Susan David through her 2018 TED Talk segment where she spoke about emotional agility. Now, once again she speaks about emotional agility and what we can do during unprecedented times like this in the latest Ted talk on Ted Connect.

I'd like to share some of the key contents that resonated from the session:

• Beauty and fragility of life make the wholeness of life.

• Emotional agility is the ability to be with ourselves or our emotional experience in a way that is compassionate and curious with ourselves.

• We have always believed that happiness and joy are most important emotional experiences we can have. Negative emotions are constantly being pushed aside. However, it is suggested that we come to terms with our current emotions and not belittle/judge ourselves when we are experiencing the unpleasant emotions.

• With social distancing (or better known as physical distancing) being part of the new normal, this could be a time we engage in a more meaningful interaction or interaction that brings value, so to say. At the end of the day, humans are social creatures - we crave of interaction.

• When comes to loneliness, perhaps we can ask ourselves, "How can I connect and how can I contribute?".

• We ought to create more value connected actions.

• We are not our emotions; they don't own us. But emotions are data that helps us move forward in ways which are courageous and connected.

One bit of the content that stands out for me was between Stimulus and Action there is a space. This space represents the choice we have; in these choices there lies our growth & freedom. (I did this little graph to illustrate it.)

My 2-cents thoughts

Emotional agility is very much relevant to many of our current situations. This pandemic has put most of us in situations we did not foresee nor ask for.

All of the above points resonated because often than not, we conceal our vulnerability through suppressing the negative emotions.

As we preserve our sane mental state, many of us try switching our mind to some positive thoughts. However, having positive thoughts alone does not mean our problem will be resolved. The more we put aside the problem, the more it can grow out of proportion. And when we finally realised the seriousness of the problem, we are probably at the stage of being overly exhausted, drained and at times, being lost - we find no way to get ourselves out of the matter. This could lead to mental health issue.

Life in general, always throw (non-stop) challenges at us and most of us, if not all, at some stages of our lives have faced with life crisis. This is all so normal. What this could mean also, we are constantly exposed to our vulnerability.

When we feel vulnerable, we began feeling unworthy of ourselves with our negative emotions start looming and clouding our mind. If we do not call upon these negative emotions and recognise what we are feeling but choose to stay in the negative emotions, the darkness will eventually creep into our soul.

With emotional agility, we call upon those emotions and try to understand why we are feeling them with compassion. It is ok to feel what we feel and why we are feeling it. The courage to call upon these unpleasant emotions and the ability to interpret them with compassion is the biggest recognition we give to ourselves - we are alive!

Next, we ought to seek healthy ways to move forward; or in some cases, get out of the negative emotions cocoon through reference to the Stimulus/Response graph as reminder or reference.

My route to (Emotional) Self Betterment

Just like the many of us, I, too have moments of darkness but life is all about sailing through our journey of self betterment.

My 3 main Do's :

• 30-minute yoga & workout. This helps calm my mind. On some days, I listened to Karma Sutra during my yoga session.

• Talking it out. I have a couple of friends who I vent out to when I am feeling down. Talking it out helps get that heavy 'rock' out of my chest. I ought to try journaling, too.

• Meditation. It has taken me many years to practise breathing meditation. While I am still constantly learning it, I recently learnt about compassion meditation from a book I read. The latter is much easier to practise and I only started last week but it does have huge calming effect to the mind and emotion. It helps me with the awareness of my emotions and slowly being able to recognise what I am feeling.

The best version of ourselves is to believe that we are all worthy of kindness. And being kind to ourselves is to nurture ourselves not just physically but emotionally and mentally.

I hope this article resonated well with you. Take care and reach out!

You can click on this link for the full TED video with Susan David: https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_david_how_to_be_your_best_self_in_times_of_crisis?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare

The audio version of this article is now available on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/47P61jrVsD5IIBnwUsCYpo