What is your favorite place?

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Life experiences leave marks that can change our routes or put us back on our axis.

The good experiences feed our identity: they enlarge our wings and make us feel stronger, healthier and happier. The impulse they bring empowers us to plan, project, take action and risk, bulge our dreams, and even love more. But what about bad experiences? How do we deal with them? What places do we choose to go when experiences bring pain?

Hurtful experiences ruthlessly overwhelm our emotions, directing us to refuge in where we can cry without restraints, hide away from further sorrow, breath out from asphyxiating reality, feel sad with sense of righteousness, and harbor our integrity and dignity. These places provide us with temporary protection while we bandage the wounds and recuperate. But, what happens when these protective mechanisms cease to be temporary shelters to become our lifestyles? How many times do these mechanisms transform in dark places in where we constantly stand to justify our fears?

When we are not able to recognize our protective mechanisms as such, then we adopt them as modum vivendum because they function as analgesics. So, pain metamorphose into fears that easily camouflage behind a bad temper to put distance between us and the others, or they entrench under excessive consumption and restless activity to silence the anguish with adrenaline, or they nestle in isolation or remoteness to detach ourselves from reality, or they warrant as our bad luck to find quick meaning.

In the long run, these inner rooms over-furnish with agony and ignite desperation, anger, and desolation. Unconsciously, we slowly debilitate our freedom and essential pillars. And, our capability of choosing happiness trembles.

Many bad experiences take years to resolve and they call for laborious and subversive distressing processes. However, we will only heal if we are willing to detour from the claws of our dark places towards points of light from where we are able to clearly identify the best construction tools to make our lives healthier and happier.

Happiness is an everyday choice. Many times we say “I cannot”...but would it happen if we could?

Inés

On Valentine's Day...

Desmayarse, atreverse, estar furioso,
áspero, tierno, liberal, esquivo,
alentado, mortal, difunto, vivo,
leal, traidor, cobarde y animoso:

no hallar fuera del bien centro y reposo,
mostrarse alegre, triste, humilde,
altivo,enojado, valiente, fugitivo,
satisfecho, ofendido, receloso:

huir el rostro al claro desengaño,
beber veneno por licor süave,
olvidar el provecho, amar el daño:

creer que el cielo en un infierno cabe;
dar la vida y el alma a un desengaño,
¡esto es amor! quien lo probó lo sabe.

Felix Lope de Vega
(1562-1635)

Should we do to feel or should we feel to do?

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Emotions such as love, joy, hope, happiness help us set priorities and find value in life.

However, we live in a society that tackles emotions, privileging the cognitive in our relationships. Consequently, we find ourselves driven to translate emotions just as a mere form of selfish entertainment or pleasurable sensations, detaching emotions from the self and the other. The result is a high level of dissatisfaction.

Perhaps this is only a reflection of the utility oriented practical culture of replaceable things and no contracts that we are living through, in which emotional beings are usually perceived as weak.

A culture that seduces us to operate at emotional high: we need to feel love to love, and love is real when it is generated by orgasmic sensations. We need to feel materially rewarded for work, and work is fun when generated by monetary returns. We need to feel good to approach others, and the moment is worth when generated by intensity.

Instability takes over and pushes to get lost in an internal roller-coaster between anxiety and guilt that never fulfills, feeling empty soon after the adrenaline lowers. The need to chase the gratification ego turns infallible, running the risk of it coming back a costly task.

Emotions need to take the place they deserve. Underestimating emotions just temporarily plasters insecurities. Only by unbalancing our emotional mechanisms we can rediscover balance.

Our emotions will awake and move when reaching out of our nutshells. But, it is tempting to scrutinize the consequences before approaching at more personal levels. The trauma of emotional life and its sterility are such that we paralyze at the possibility of becoming overwhelmed and flooded by internal realities and emotional engagement that are out of our control.

Giving the emotional life the place it deserves will activate the capacity to heal, to transform, and to connect with meaning. Involvement and genuine connections help juggle impulses, feelings, sensations, and emotions to resolve them, to close wounds, and to give each what they deserve so as to build a genuine construction of the self and reality.

“All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

Inés