This week's QOTW is the first of a trilogy of questions relating to emotions. Oh yes, we've all heard of them, we all have them, and yet they can be the most least understood aspect of our humanness. We aren't born with a rule book about how to understand, manage and work with our emotions, and most of us aren't taught about it by our parents or even at school.
Understanding our emotions can mean the difference between living life in a state of anger, depression, hate and jealousy OR knowing how to have healthy, loving and intimate relationships with all the people in our lives. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we were able to avoid so many unnecessary conflicts, whether they be about trivial things like flushing the toilet, pickup up our socks, or the very important things such as how to discipline our children or how we relate to each other. This week we make a start on understanding our emotions by answering the very simple question of :
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO OWN OUR EMOTIONS?
This week our beloved @ecotrain passengers have written an amazing series of answers to this weeks' question. I can personally say that I have learned SO much by reading all these different perspectives and I hope that you can also read at least a few answers and take the journey of self discovery and self improvement with us. If there is one thing that we use in todays world, it is a course in emotional intelligence. This is something that really can change our lives, and our relationships with our family and friends and open up the door to a whole new world of healthy dynamics and intimacy.
I hope you find these posts as illuminating as I have, and we hope to hear your views in the comments below. You can also join us and post your own answer to this weeks question with the #ecotrain tag so that I can find them. I am upvoting your answers as part of the Minnow Support Project and hope to encourage you to look within and share your perspectives with us.
Don't forget to follow the Steemians that you resonate with so you can see more of their amazing posts in your feed!
@vegan.niinja
What Does It Mean To Own Your Emotions?
I actually don't know if I can answer this question, because I am not sure such a thing can exist. The connection between our thoughts and feelings is obvious for most of us by now I suppose, that what we think, we immediately feel. Sometimes though, it can be quite difficult to locate one specific thought that cause a feeling. Not because it doesn't exist, but because it is such an old thought that has become a habit and believe and effects our subconscious mind in every action we take.
When we start to understand the connection inside us between our thoughts and emotions, we are aware of which effects our thoughts have on us. We are more likely to re-think some of those thoughts, and consciously choose thoughts that are having a more positive effect on our feelings. The more we start to question our thought (read Byron Katies books!), the happier we get. We start to see in ourselves, that we are not what we think, but the awareness behind it. Who is it, that can be aware of a thought if we were that thought? Think about that a second, and get still.
@nainaztengra
Emotions the very nature of my existence.
I feel in general Emotions sometimes come as storms and sometimes a light breeze.
It has become a habit for us to live in Emotions all the time, We want to keep reacting or feeling something all the time. But there are different ways people deal with it. Some express it out very boldly and some just bury them within and there are very few people I have seen who live out of this window of emotions
For me what does owning my emotions mean?
Sometimes people tell me I am a very cold person and its just because they dont find me reacting to extremes of situations.
So does this mean I am like that?
No it's not that I do not have them, it's just that I like to look at every situation very objectively be it a situation of happiness or sadness.
The other thing is as a healer and counsellor I have many people coming to me with their problems and when I look at it from the other side I see things with clarity, as to what is the root cause of it and that helps me manage my life from their learnings.
@sharoonyasir
I am quite an emotional person and an expressive one too. However, for a long time I did not really know what it was to own up to your emotions or why was it really important to do that. But since the time I started working on different books related to self-acceptance and self-love as a ghost writer, my knowledge and understanding of your emotions and why you must own them has improved. This has really improved the way I think and feel about things and how I react and respond to different situations. In fact, now that I have started embracing and owning up to my emotions, I don't react to them instead I let them settle in and respond to them.
This week when I saw the @ecotrain's question of the week (qotw) on what it means to own your emotions, I couldn't have been happier. It was something I have been thinking a lot about and since I have been quite absent from Steemit lately, I thought the question was a great one to do a post on. Here is my take on it.
@hopehuggs
Owning your emotions could mean many different things to different people, but to me it's the freedom of being yourself.
You decide who you want to be.
And live that. You deserve to be you in all your full technicolor glory. Or maybe that should in all your HD glory, these days. I wear my heart on my sleeve and I will tell and demonstrate to people that I care about them, even though sometimes it is the wrong person. I have done it here on Steemit, fallen prey to nice words and false friendship. Wasn't the first time, doubt it will be the last.
@solarsupermama
Excuse Me, Do These Emotions Belong to You?
This is the ecoTrain question of the week: What does it mean to own your emotions?
This is an incredibly heavy question. I'm going to try to keep it simple and relatively brief so it remains digestible. I'm not trying to say that I know all there is to know about emotions or even a majority. I'm just saying that if you have been in my general vicinity, I have probably felt your emotions. I've always been this way. I almost always know what others are feeling. I can sense when there is a rift between people. I know when someone is sad. I can feel when people aren't listening to one another. Sometimes it's exhausting.
@thegreens
Emotions?
Emotions are generally good or bad, sad or happy, love or hate and reflective, research or critical thinking feelings we get as a result of instincts, intuition, circumstances, modes or relationships that occur within or without us.
What does it mean to own your emotions?
To own your emotions means to be aware of these emotions, accept the emotions and take action about the emotions.
I enjoy the way @riverflows and @mountainjewel write about accepting and owning emotions and I just want to stress more on taking actions with respect to our emotions which to me is the most important aspect about owning emotions.
First I want to say, most often we let negativity consume us and this explains why memories of sad moments persist in our lives. I think this is basically because we aware and accept these sad moments but most often do not take action to critically question, challenge or conquer these moments but rather prefer to accept and drown in our sad moments.
@zen-art
What an interesting question. One that has been puzzling people for ages. There were poets who wrote songs about it and writers who filled numerous book pages in an attempt to unravel this mystery. Who am I then, to question their wisdom? What insight can I bring to this question that many others before me have not already brought to light? I am for just a simple soul, but a unique one. Just as you are. Our thoughts matter, your thoughts matter, don't ever let anyone tell you different.
There are two great skills each of us has to master in our life. They are maybe the most important things to learn how to do in order to live a happy and satisfying life. One is to know when to put the mask on and the other is to master the ability to take it off. You know what mask I am talking about. The one that is hiding your emotions.
@eco-alex
This question of the week is split into three questions. Question 1 is a question that I have heard spoken before, but I have never really thought deeply about. What does it really mean when someone says that you need to "own your our emotions?" Now, we all have emotions and express them to varying degrees, some more than others. But what does it really mean to own them? Well, the first thing that springs to mind is the word responsibility. To me owning something means being responsible for them, and emotions are no different. I know a lot of people (including me) who all too easily pin the blame of their emotions on others, whether that is anger, hate, frustration or whatever. Often we are triggered by something and we push back with our emotional responses. These responses are not always in proportion to the situation, and yet there are times when we feel as though they are because that trigger has made us so angry,.. and since we feel angry it must be justified, right? Well, things are not really that simple.
@wombloom
We all have emotions. Sooo many emotions. The flower shows us a few.
Sometimes it is as if that is the only thing we live for, to experience emotions.
It's like they are a current that is created in the interaction between our spirit and our physicality.
Sometimes I wonder if they are just meant to pass through us, while we do nothing but witness them, exactly like clouds, created in the interaction between the earth and the sun, or if we are supposed to make sense of them and act upon them.
The thing is, it seems almost impossible not to try to make sense of our emotions and to act on them. So while the inevitable is happening and our thoughts and actions are influenced by our feelings, I think we might as well become aware of this force that drives us.
Our mysterious emotions, which nobody told us a lot about, because they seemed kind of impractical or even shameful to a lot of people in our patriarchic culture. Some may even have thought that it might drive one crazy to be too much interfering with ones emotions. Others may even have felt that emotions were of a 'lower order', from a spiritual point of view and that focussing your attention on them might 'lower' your vibration. There are many variations on the condeming of our emotions to a place where the light of our awareness does not reach.
@trucklife-family
I have mixed feelings about this Question, firstly because I am not a fan of ownership. When we own something it usually brings out this need to hold onto it, to not want to part with it, to try and control it.The only thing I believe we own is our bodies because that is the one thing that we should strive to hold onto. In all other areas of our life I have seen ownership change people and not for the better. But that is also what makes this question such a good one, because if I don't believe in owning my emotions, what do I believe in?
Before I get into that, I want to look at how emotions are received within Western society. It seems that everywhere you go being happy is the one emotion that people feel comfortable with. Of course this makes sense, because we all strive to be happy, and seeing some one over joyed makes everyone else around them feel the same. It is almost infectious. So much time and energy is put in making ourselves happy, we are meant to be happy right? But if we are happy all of the time what happens to the other (lets say)90% of ourselves.
@mountainjewel
Emotion can be symbolized by water. If we look at this in terms of the ocean, we have a large body of water with varying depths, turbidity, shifts and changes throughout the day given the weather and even what types of animals and boats are moving through it.
Emotions, in our culture, are thought of as feminine and, because our culture is still dominated by a patriarchal valuation system where rationality, objectivity and thought are prized over their "seeming opposites", subjectivity, feeling and intuition, we have a long way to go, as a culture, to value and be connected to our emotional states.
When we are young, for example, we aren't practiced at manipulating or hiding our emotions. We just let it all flow in the present moment. Crying one moment, joyous the next. When we reach adulthood, we've learned how to "control" our emotional responses, which largely means holding them in and not processing them.
@riverflows
Now, if you know @riverflows at all, she's an emotional gal. She wears her heart on her sleeve every damn day and she's been, at her very very core, an emotionally reactive gal. Once, she felt shame over this, as if she was different from everyone else who seemed to quite manage their emotions quite well. I'm not sure why I'm talking about myself in the third person here – maybe because I don't really want to own this version of myself.
I am changing, moment to moment, and I don't want to "own' anything about who I think "I am'.
Owning is all about ‘I’ – this is mine. So when we ‘own’ our emotions, what we are really saying is ‘this anger is mine’, this grief is mine, this frustration is mine. That might sound like a great step to taking responsibility for ourselves and to be aware of who we are, which essentially doesn't sound that bad (and for some us, that might be a good first step). Yet the more we do this, the worse our emotions can become - the more solid and the more they can have a dramatic effect on our lives.
Thus, my intuition with this question is that I don't think we should own our emotions.
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Hi @eco-alex, this is a very interesting question, especially when it comes to high sensitive people which many times are experiencing emotions of other people without even know it.
i'm looking forward to see the next question, cheers
Oooh great comment! Thank u
your welcome mate
I think one of the most interesting things about this question is the way in which it is framed. For some reason, it made me think of the concept of 'gaslighting' whereby people re-frame or re-illuminate your own experience in their own light. Asking someone to 'own' their emotions seems to me like a way of disempowering them and deflecting any participation they/you might be having in the creation of these emotions. Obviously, we all have emotions and we all try our best to 'own' them, understand them and adjust to the complexities life throws at us.... however, the crux of the issue at hand might demand a greater examination of the situation, the instigator of the emotion in question or simply an understanding that, 'yeah, sure I do own my emotions, but can you see how natural and expected these emotions are if you are going to be/do/say things like that?' Being emotional superhumans that can remain stoic and responsible emotionally all the time might seem like a superior alternative to the reactionary conditioning we are usually stuck with, but if people are not careful, the emphasis on 'owning one's emotions' might obfuscate the very real and tangible things in our lives that can be acted on, instead of, or in addition to one's emotions only. A bit rambly, but I hope someone out there gets what I am saying.... lovely entries, all of you!
thanks for you inputs! I understand what you say.. and im sure there are times when this phrase can be used in ways that are no even quite right.. but equally.. when said to one self, by one self.. to really dig deeper into our actions and responses i think its a very useful self inquiry..
VERY nice to see you here, AND commenting after so many moons!!
<3 xx
If ownership means control, then owning our emotions would mean that we control them, they don't control us.
We've got positive and negative emotions. The only ones that actually need controlling are the negative ones and we can teach ourselves to do that.
Until we can control our mind, it will be impossible to control our emotions. There are mental exercises a person can do.
Very true what u say! LearnIng to tame the monkey mind is quite the challenge! Thanks for stopping by!
Some amazing entries! I really like this question and tomorrow I am going to make a video for answering this. :-) Thank you @eco-alex, I will be creating content every week to answer QOTW. Making this a regular habit.
Love,
@sugandhaseth
oh NICE! super cool, i loved the last one! cant wait to see it!
Awesome. It's done @eco-alex. :)
Owning your emotions is to embrace them and not dwell negatively on them! Great collection of creators with so many good answers!
What a moving and heart warming bunch of posts. I learnt so much from this QOTW from you all. So powerful. Thanks everyone for sharing your beautiful thoughts about a topic that affects us all so profoundly. Much love 💚💚💚🤗🤗🤗
Thanks for being a part of it! Xx
this is a great QOTW @ecotrain ! Modern society tough us to block out emotions, most human beings are raised listening to things such? 'why are you crying? stop crying! don't be sad! cheer up! stop being silly!...' These are all affirmations that suppresses emotions leading to depression, anxiety and so on.. I found really interesting everyones opinion on the this subject! I see emotions as just energy, information.. that can be useful to us when we just observe it instead of living them as they are us. In a way they have a life on their own, is up to us to feed them or not..if we do react to them, feed them we end up with a very cluttered mind, and a thought pattern that feeds the emotion...but if we just acknowledge emotions and let them pass is a very enriching experience.. clarity comes with it! thank you for sharing such a grate post! blessings and love
lovely comment, i QUITE agree of course!! thanks for stopping by andabout.. Love your profile pic!! ;-))
I found you today and love your post :)
So many great answers this week again!! I have read some of them, its very interesting how every one of us, have a different view on this topic.
Much Love to you Alex!
xx
Wow, great collection of posts. :)
Emotions shape our thoughts and life so it was very interesting for me, how everyone felt about owning something that influences their existence. :)