Sunday Reading 26 August 2007

My adrenaline has been getting a workout the past three weeks at the theatre. First we showed Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Next was Transformers. Now we’re showing Live Free or Die Hard. Exciting movies all that draw me in each time I watch them.

One of the things I like to do at the theatre is watch people’s reactions. I enjoy seeing them have a good time. I enjoy seeing the range of emotions that the films engender in them. I’ve long thought about the popularity of film, books, and soap operas (especially soap operas!), and believe that same capacity to arouse emotions is one of the reasons for it. Stories, whether read, heard, or watched take us outside of ourselves. They put us in situations in a way that is physically safe, but like dreams, our bodies treat them as if they are physically real. In this sense, they’re therapy.

I would never recommend that we live our lives through other people’s stories. That isn’t what I mean at all. We will get nowhere, learn nothing, and end life in a state of depression or regret if vicarious thrills are the focus of our lives. Watching and reading are like being in a lecture classroom. It isn’t in the classroom that we really learn. It is in what we do in our own activities that we learn. The fictional experience needs to be put into action in our own lives.

But what about the negative emotions? Most of us don’t want to experience them in our ‘real’ lives. After all, that’s why they’re called negative. In Negative Emotions - How Would You Define Them? Lyman Reed asks how we define negative emotions.

Edward Mills takes another look emotions in Law of Attraction Emotional Scale Redefined - With Help From Marshall Rosenberg.

Something that both of these posts show, is that the negative emotions are signs in just the same way as the positive emotions. They become the biggest problem when we identify with them rather than experiencing them as feedback .

In The Unlimited Power to Create Your Life Karen Lynch quotes from Dolly Parton:

We cannot direct the Wind, but we can adjust the Sails

Our emotions, negative and positive, are part of the wind. We normally don’t directly command them. They are responses that show us when our needs and wants are being met. We can use them to find out what changes we need to make in our lives, whether in the outer environment of our circumstances, or the inner environment of our beliefs.

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Thank you to all who have visited Shards in the past few weeks. I hope you have useful, and inspirational work here. I especially thank all who have linked to various posts.Aaron Potts of Today is that Day in Master List of Personal Development BloggersLiz Strauss at Successful Blog in SOB Business Cafe 08-24-07And lest we forget, the Personal Development List begun by Priscilla Palmer has grown dramatically. Lyman Reed has posted it at the Personal Development Carnival in The Personal Development List.

Technorati Tags: negative emotions, movies, books, soap operas, Lyman Reed, Edward Mills, Karen Lynch, Liz Strauss, Priscilla Palmer, Personal Development List

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