How Are You Feeling Today? No, I Mean -- HOW Are You Feeling Today? Seriously...

"How do you feel?"

"I don't know. I feel good."

Ah, I hear it much too often. Till recently I was saying this much too often. When it comes to feelings most of us Northern people use a rather simplistic approach. We tend to have two categories: GOOD and BAD. The more advanced ones of us add perhaps ANGER, FRUSTRATION and BOREDOM, the ones in love add LOVE, which becomes GOOD a few years down the road into the stable relationship...

Perhaps too simplistic from my side, but there are thoughts to consider.

Got me thinking again today when I was watching a TV-show where a sweet elderly woman was trying to explain how she felt when she found out that her beloved family member could have been killed in the earthquake at Haiti. You could see from her eyes the intensity of her feelings: the fear, concern, desperation, love, hope and guilt all mixed together. Yet she had only a few words to express her inner world: worried and hopeful.

She just didn't have words to describe what she felt.



Many of us are under-educated in feeling, we get scared whenever we experience a strong stimulation. Not only can't we describe what's going on inside of us, we also lack appropriate responses to the feelings we are able to describe.

Please, take a moment and describe what do you feel right now. Yeah, say it out -- what do you feel?

I know when I asked this myself some time ago I was pretty shocked of my lack of vocabulary. Damn, I'm a well-educated young woman, full of life -- how come I find it so hard to describe my inner world in a casual moment?

Maybe you did better in the first try, congratulations! Either way -- which words did you use? Interested? Concerned? Hopeful? Fearful? Excited? Relieved?

Question is how emotionally literate are you? How many words do you have to let your inner world out in words? Can you put apart your sleepiness from stress, lack of water or physical exhaustion? Do you notice when your disappointment grows into anger? Or is it all one big "bad" or "angry"?

What's going on inside of you? Can you feel when your hope becomes satisfaction or appreciation grows into gratitude? Do you know when your love is really a desire and when this tiny flickering in the back side of your brain is actually curiosity? Or just one big junk of "good"?

I was recently reading a great book "Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys", where the authors explain what does it mean to be emotionally literate.

They bring out 3 characteristics of developing your emotional language:

1. You can describe your feelings with words
2. You can define what's the meaning of the words, body language and mimics
3. You understand situations that create an emotional reaction -- this means you understand that different situations create a different emotion and you are able to choose an appropriate reaction to solve the situation.

If this caused an AHA-moment then here's the good news: you can always get better with practice. Take time to describe your feelings, the delightful details of your love, joy and happiness and breaking your frustration into understandable emotions. Successful relationships and happy life is built on being able to understand yourself, no more messy: "I don't know's" please, when someone asks how you feel. You can do it, one little feeling after the other.

Anything for a juicy, rich and conscious life, ya!

PS: Here's a little something to get you started with -- take a look at the list of the emotions and remind yourself the situations where you actually experienced this feeling. Told you theres more than "good" and "bad":)