How to Observe the Emotional World

How to Observe the Emotional World

(Estimated Reading Time: 1 min, 33 sec)

Q: We always hear about the importance of inner observation, but how can we consciously watch our emotional world? Even as children, to get us used to hold our attention on one thing — to learn about it in depth — our parents used to say: “Look at it with care. Look at it nearby!”

Did they, though, explain how to observe things inside of us? Did they show that searching inside ourselves can be a wonderful adventure?

This is how we grew up, developing our external “view”, paying attention to what is going on in the surrounding environment, but neglecting and repressing everything that the stimuli we receive from it provokes inside us.

The “outside” has become more important than the “inside”: therefore, we often must deal with things that have become bigger than us, and are difficult to control and manage. This magnifies our fear and sense of inferiority.

External observation and internal observation are different.

We frequently use the former — which requires the engagement of our eyes and our minds — for the latter as well.

But it doesn’t work.

In this way, we hold our emotional world under the focus of the rationality, which takes complete control of it.

By inhibiting our emotions so that they cannot express themselves — what they yearn to do — we doom ourselves to unhappiness and illness.

To set them free, we should not jump, nor scream, as children who have not yet learned to manage emotions; we just need to release and observe them.

It’s difficult, as it was memorizing the multiplication tables, do you remember?

Conscious observation of our emotional world.

Conscious observation is inner listening in a state of calm openness.

Think of yourself as a parent; consider your emotions to be your little children, who are playing on the lawn outside your house.

You don’t see them, but you can follow their movements, listen to their cries of joy, and feel delighted by their free and joyful expansiveness.

This clarifies how you can observe. The parent does not take part directly in children’s games, does not organize them, does not judge or disapprove. The parent simply lets them make experience and play.

Feeling our inner forces, playing psychological games, and observing our sub-personalities, we make conscious experience.

Aurora Mazzoldi