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

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