The Power of Emotion: Using Your Emotional Energy to Transform Your Life - Couverture souple

Sky, Michael

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1879181924 ISBN 13 : 9781879181922

Editeur : Bear & Company, 2002

Synopsis

An original model of the nature and workings of emotions.

• Shows how to both unleash and harness the power of emotions to promote physical health, mental clarity, creativity, and more satisfying relationships.

• Offers easy-to-follow breathing exercises that allow readers to tap into their reservoirs of vital energy to accomplish their goals.

• By the author of Breathing: Expanding Your Power and Energy (25,000 sold).

Emotions are the link between body, mind, spirit, and all our relationships, yet as Westerners we have been trained from our earliest years to repress our emotions. In our society, those who appear the least passionate are seen as strong, confident, and mature. In our desire to attain this goal, we often suppress our deepest emotions, eventually causing a blockage of energy that leaves us numb and unable to access our authentic feelings.

Michael Sky explains that emotions are the vital energy source inside each of us that we can harness and direct in a positive way to promote better physical health, mental clarity, creativity, and more satisfying relationships. He details four simple but potent tools to aid in the productive channeling of powerful emotional energy: active acceptance; dynamic relaxation; conscious, connected breathing; and creative choice. Taken together these tools create a lifestyle that frees suppressed emotional energies and allows for empowered responses. With meditative breathing practices at the end of each chapter and inspirational passages from the teachings of Adi Da, readers will learn to positively experience and develop their emotions while enhancing their creativity and productivity to accomplish their goals.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Michael Sky (1951-2011) was a breathwork teacher, certified polarity therapist, and firewalking instructor, and the author of Dancing with Fire, The Power of Emotion and Breathing: Expanding Your Power and Energy. Michael led human potential seminars for twenty-five years, including more than 200 firewalks.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Introduction

The bodily being of Man is constantly sustained by
the Eternal, All-Pervading Force of Life. In our infantile
recoil, reaction, and psycho-physical contraction toward
self, we separate from the Eternal Reality and
become self-possessed. Thus, we begin to starve and
suffer. . . . If only the body-mind will open into the
Current of Radiant Life, with full feeling and without
thought, it will be liberated from the self-possessed
games of tension and release of tension. Then there
is only Fullness of Life.
--ADI DA SAMRAJ, THE EATING GORILLA COMES IN PEACE

What a muddle we make of our emotions. From an early age we struggle to hold back tears, to rein in temper, to stifle fear. We worry about the future and regret the past. We ache from loneliness but recoil from intimacy. We want and we want, and so much of our wanting goes unfulfilled, leaving us frustrated, ashamed, envious. Our lives reveal a myriad of ways to feel bad; we feel bad much of the time.
Yet even feeling good brings difficulties. Pleasure leads easily into lust, as success leads into pride and appreciation, into greed. Love hurts as surely as it heals. Over-enthusiasm causes various problems, as do laughing too loudly and playing too hard. Faith begets betrayal, joy begets disappointment, and sex begets major complications. The good feelings never seem to last, and the more urgently we enjoy them, the more their passing wounds us.
Over time, most people develop strategies for feeling less. Since emotion vexes and torments us so, we find ways to suppress our emotional experience. We learn to deaden our feelings, to turn off sensation, to numb out. Like rocks in the midst of rushing water--unmoved and unmovable--we cultivate stoicism. We strive to prevail, unaffected by life's changes. Those who never show their feelings reap the highest praise.
We rationalize. Emotional expression belongs to the world of children, we say, while maturity means getting one's emotions under control. The overly emotional seem weak under fire; we favor those who remain firm and clearheaded during the worst of times. We especially spurn the messiness of emotional display, its bad form and awkward timing. Spiritual advancement, we assume, requires the taming of one's feelings. We distrust decisions and actions that have too much emotional influence. We try to do things rationally and logically, to act without feeling.
Ultimately, each of us finds our own way with emotion. Some people--the granite faced and stone hearted--manage to completely suppress their feelings. Most only partially succeed: one never cries, for instance, but melancholy persists. Other people utterly fail despite all efforts, therapies, and medications; they spend their lives in a psychiatric soup of mutinous emotion. Still others ignore all of society's warnings and anti-emotional dictates and remain unabashedly romantic, zealous, fiery, gushy, sentimental: they become artists, musicians, eccentrics, or clowns and migrate to the margins of social respectability.
Being socially acceptable demands that we get our feelings under firm control and keep emotional energy mostly unexpressed. That so many people do so well at suppressing their emotions constitutes a singular failing in human development and, I believe, a root cause of many problems in
modern society.
Since the mid-1970s, I have been meeting with individuals and groups as a therapist, counselor, teacher, and bodyworker. I have listened to thousands of life stories and have worked with a wide range of physical and psychological symptoms and complaints. I have learned that emotion plays an essential role in our lives, for better and for worse; that emotional energy subsists as a vital force within the human organism and as the functional link between body, mind, spirit, and environment; and that flowing with one's feelings opens the way to physical health, mental clarity, greater success in relationships, and more effective creativity.
I define emotion as energy-in-motion. Like ocean waves undulating along a shoreline, emotional energy exists as a constant flowing presence in our lives. Human feelings--these subtle currents, part liquid, part electric--arise as vital energy moving within, around, and between us, forever animating spirits, coloring thoughts, influencing dreams, heartening relationships, and providing the raw material for our bodies and creative efforts.
This book describes a radical path to Homo emotus: the feeling human. You will learn first to actively accept your emotions; second, to keep your emotional energies in perpetual motion; and finally, to direct all emotions to good, creative use. You will learn four basic tools that will profoundly transform your emotional experience. With time, you can effectively marshal the creative force that dwells in every feeling.
At the end of each chapter I have included simple breathing practices that help you to experience and develop your energy-in-motion. I recommend that you do each practice at least once (the more the better), that you do them as you read, and that you do them in the order they appear in the book. In this way, you will step-by-step develop an awareness of your breathing as an ever present and always flowing transformational process. By the end of The Power of Emotion, if you have practiced, you will possess powerful tools for improving your physical and mental health, your relationships, and your creative efforts. Moreover, you will have formed a lasting appreciation for the beauty and power of human emotion.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Bear & Company
• Date d'édition: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1879181924
• ISBN 13: 9781879181922
• Reliure: Broché
• Langue: anglais
• Nombre de pages: 144
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible