Chapter 5: Emotional Wisdom

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (American Essayist, Poet and Philosopher, 1817-1862)

… Emotions can be measured in our brains in the kind of waves that are generated in reaction to our habitual thoughts. Today’s society emphasizes left-brain functions, which generate high-range beta-waves in response to stress; these in turn have an effect on what we experience as “out there.” Les Fehmi and Jim Robbins in their book “The Open-Focus Brain” describe what happens to the brainwaves in a stressful situation:

“Narrow focus (high-range beta-wave thinking) exacerbates fearful circumstances; and then when circumstances have changed and we are no longer in ‘danger,’ we tend to stay in narrow focus as a way of avoiding our residual feelings of fear and anxiety, accompanied by a middle-to high-beta range of frequencies to keep unpleasant feelings from surfacing.”3

It is not that we need to control our emotions, rather we need to first understand how they work, what effect they have on us, and then to know how to properly use them. Later we can learn how emotions help us manifest what we want. We can do all this through the practice of art, in various forms.

— excerpt from the book Parallel Mind by Aliyah Marr
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Copyright 2007-2008 Aliyah Marr
http://www.parallelmindbook.com