Our individual worlds are filled with 3 things—–thoughts, emotions and actions. All through life, we rotate between these options, either individually, or in a combination. Usually, one follows the other. A thought gives rise to an emotion, and that emotion makes us act. For example, if we have a thought of an impending examination, we get worried, anxious, and scared. The thought gives the emotion. We then act on the emotion of fear or anxiety and start studying hard for the exam (or decide to avoid giving the exams, or decide to cheat and copy, or whatever). The stimulus for our thought–emotion–action stream often comes spontaneously, when we have a thought out of nowhere, or it comes from seeing, hearing, smelling, touching or meeting someone or something in the external environment. Watching television where an accident is being shown, could trigger a whole set of thoughts, emotions and actions. Watching a football match triggers another set of these. Listening to someone praising us or criticizing us sets into motion another set of thoughts, emotions and actions. And many times, one thought leads to another. We think of examinations, and then we think of our teacher, and then that elicits either joy or anger or grief…and so on.
Most often, we will realize that we don’t have much control over our thoughts or emotions, unless we are extremely aware and in present moment consciousness. When there is an internal or external stimulus or trigger, there is a space where we could halt the progress of thought–emotion–action. But that space is very narrow, and usually a trigger gives us a thought, which quickly leads to an emotion or action.
Thoughts are, by and far, unavoidable, and it has been said that on an average, we go through sixty thousand thoughts a day. And remember, that each of these thoughts triggers an emotion, even if we are not aware of the connection. Like thoughts, we realize that emotions are also pretty unavoidable. Because we exist, we have thoughts and these thoughts invariably lead to positive emotions of joy, happiness, contentment, peace, and relaxation, or they lead to negative emotions of fear, anxiety, dread, guilt, grief, lust, worry, anger, jealousy or victimhood.
Our emotions are actually e motions, or energy in motion. They are bundles of energy which, once generated, need to move through us, in a natural form. For example, when a child is hurt, or when he cannot see his mother, he feels pain. And he or she instantly reacts with crying and screaming. After a while, the crying stops and the child becomes quiet. Or if a child is denied a favorite toy, he or she throws a tantrum, falls on the ground, screams, bangs her head on the wall, and refuses to listen to reason. Eventually, after a while, the tantrum ends. Or when offered a candy or ice cream, a child brightens up, smiles or laughs, often jumps up and down in joy, and hugs her mother tightly. What the child is doing, in each of the above instances, is completely and truly expressing her emotions, without holding back. As a result, such a child does not create any block or stagnation to the energy of the emotion she feels, and once the emotion is fully expressed, the child goes back to her normal, harmonious and balanced state.
What happens with adults, and older children is that time and again, we have been taught and conditioned that it is not always good to display our emotions, everyone will not like it, it is not socially acceptable, people will think badly of us, our reputation will go down etc. and over many years, we have skillfully and successfully learnt to suppress or deny our emotions. Even if we are feeling abused or hurt, we tend to keep quiet. Of if we feel angry, we often swallow our anger, to keep the peace. Even joy and laughter we control and exhibit in small doses, lest people take offence. All this results in too much of energy inside us which has not found an outlet. Like a river, the energy of emotions needs to flow freely. Since we don’t allow our emotions to flow freely, blocks and stagnations occur in our body.
-P V Vaidyanathan