Emotional Wellbeing

 

Identify Yourself

“In Irish, when you talk about emotion you don’t say, ‘I am sad.’ You’d say, ‘sadness is on me’—ta bron orm. And I love that because there’s an implication of not identifying yourself with the emotion fully. I am not sad, it’s just that sadness is on me for a while. Something else is on me another time, and that is a good thing to recognize.”

Padraig O. Tauma

          My friend Leslie West posted this on Facebook this morning. I liked it immediately. Saying “anger is upon me” for instance, is light years away from saying I am angry—as though that one word describes the totality of your being. For example, I have a friend, Ron, who is in the hospital in North Carolina right now. He’s had a very rough week; one I cannot imagine going through. He’s been in atrial fibrillation for several months and for the last week has received close to 100 shocks from his embedded defibrillator. Tomorrow, he will have a surgical procedure to correct the problem. I hope you’ll keep him and his doctors in your thoughts and prayers. Sadness has been upon the whole family watching Ron go through this difficult time, but they are not always sad people. Fear has been upon him and his loved ones, but they are not normally fearful people. This is a passage; they will come out on the other side perhaps happier than they have been for years.

          There is a psychological and energetic component to how we identify ourselves, too. When we use “I am…” to describe ourselves, it not only eliminates all the other adjectives that describe us equally well, but it also sends a message to the body/mind to be that—to be that sadness, or be that anger, or whatever. We shift our psychic energy, our chi, to fuel that emotion. When we do it for long enough, we may begin to identify with the emotion, or that illness. We see ourselves as sad and broken. We communicate that message to everyone around us, and they respond as though we are only that. “He’s an angry person.” “She’s always so sad.”

          I feel sad for Ron right now. And a little bit afraid for him. But I also feel hopeful that the doctors will get to the problem and fix it. And I feel delighted with this beautiful day, and grateful for the communications I’ve had with friends and family. It’s always surprising to me that when times are most difficult, we move closer to one another and open the lines of communication. Ron is surrounded by love—love is on him! I like that.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane