Emotion Agility – Understanding the emotions that guide us

Hey guys what is up welcome back to my blog I’m so thankful that you guys took the time out of your day to read my blog post. Hope you all are safe from the COVID-19 and having a great day. I have so much to say about this book and I am trying to control myself, so let’s go.

Emotions. The main theme of the book is about not being driven by emotions, its about not letting our emotions control us. The reason why I love this concept so much is that the Bhagavad Gita tells us the same thing, it tells us to control our emotions and our mind instead of letting the take over. This books talks a lot about how to detach from your emotions and how to feel them and not let them control you.

The book tells us about tons of different cases where Emotional Agility can come in handy straight from childhood all the way up to having a job. The book isn’t just another, ‘think positive and deny the negative emotions’ kind of book rather the book talks about the so called negative emotions in detail (I believe that nothing is negative it’s just all about how we use it). Emotions like fear, anger, discomfort all of them as discussed and talked about, we are told how we must learn to feel these emotions and how to learn from them and not lose ourselves in them.

I really loved how the book divides the way we experience emotions into three distinct types. The first one is bottling, which comes from things like, ‘Boys don’t cry’, ‘You just need to push through this.’ and while I do agree that sometimes we just need to push through things it doesn’t mean that we don’t need to validate our feelings, we need to stop bottling and keeping the feelings inside of us and instead feel them and understand them. The second type is dwelling which is, ‘I am not good at this.’, ‘I so messed up typing up that blog post.’ Yes I’ll admit this is me sometimes and this is more like spiraling, thinking about an emotion again and again and letting it completely take you over and control your future performance. The third and final type of experiencing emotion is experiencing the emotion and detaching ourselves from it. This might seem very complex but it’s actually very simple, when we feel sad we need to acknowledge that we feel sad and then learn and move on.

Another thing that the book talk about is chanting something to really acknowledge that thing’s presence and see it for it’s qualities allowing us to really be present in the moment. My mantra meditation works on a similar principle and I so related to this, once I chant the name of God constantly I begin to think about the form of the Lord, His different pastimes and all of this combined makes for a really grounding and deeply spiritual experience. This is also why repeating affirmations to yourself works so well.

The book mainly speaks about how to be emotionally agile in every aspect of our lives and while I disagree with some parts of the book such as talking of only the relative truth and not the absolute truth or saying that ‘negative opinions are wrong’ because a negative opinion is just that a negative opinion and according to what the book teaches we must not let that opinion affect our ego but rather take the opinion for what it is, analyze it, determine if it’s true and move forward. While the book has some mistakes like these or rather we can call it contradictions or surface knowledge, the book is regardless a very good read and absolutely essential for everyone since it also teaches a lot like having ‘compassion for ourselves when we burnout’ which I am implementing. I want everyone to read the book and to learn to detach from our emotions and move on, making us truly, Emotionally Agile.

So that is it for this post guys hope you got some value from this.  Thank you guys for reading to the end hit me up on Instagram and Twitter with your thoughts and if you have any ideas on what I should write about. Stay safe from the COVID-19. Thank you again and I’ll see you all next week.