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Jamie Millard's avatar

Oh Veronika. The synchronicities make me smile! Emotional intelligence is my big project right now that I am leaning into at work. I’m trying to meet the poetry of the science and the art. Or should I say the heArt. Cuore-osity. In doing so I’ve tried to introduce poetry to a bunch of type As. It’s an interesting conversation between psychologists and other healthcare clinicians. The term empath drives me crazy. Empathy is meeting somebody where they are not where we want them to be. It’s a response. Positive thinking is blown out of proportion. Resilience seems to be the gate through which wisdom arrives? There is an article on the neuroscience of resilience that somehow resonates with me the most.

I will read this a few times as I always learn so much more and trip over the truth in the spaces between your words. On an interesting note, the science is telling us “ emotional intelligence” has significantly gone down the last four years.

In the end, I think it comes down to -is a story telling us or are we telling the story? Emotions are definitely only messengers. The mystery is the way.

Thank you for sharing your gift and living into the questions! 🙏❤️

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Katerina Nedelcu's avatar

Oh, yes! Veronika, lovely post. This is going to be a long comment—you said great things, and I resonate with you deeply! :)

I took my time to read it slowly over a cup of tea. The first thing I wanted to mention, as a philosophy lover, is that Descartes originally said, "dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum" (I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am), but it was simplified to the version: "I think, therefore I am." He intended to convey that a being who doubts, affirms, denies, knows some things, and is ignorant of many others still exists. This has been referred to as "the expanded cogito." Anyway, I understand your point!

I think science has little to do with understanding emotions—it helps us grasp the external world and its laws, the how and why—but when it comes to the internal world, there is no science. There’s intuition, dreams, poetry and the acceptance of the "good," the "bad," and everything in between. The ability to understand things as a whole "unidentified griefcase" distinguishes the adult mind from the child mind. Most adults are stuck at a certain developmental stage where emotions became difficult to process and their "rational" parents did what they know best. As you well pointed out, many parents are dismissive of emotions because they can't make sense of them.

You must make room for emotions. Since we are born as emotional beings, it is our gift, our art, and our internal world. We are afraid of ourselves, of our nature. We are made of emotions, and we can't reason them away or "heal" them—we can only integrate, give them a voice, sit with them, and allow them to exist without reason. You can't tell this to someone who is always thinking from A to B, the "correct" way. There is no "correct" way to feel. Emotions are like our fingerprints—unique.

That’s why I started studying Alchemy—Tarot, Dreams, and Astrology—because the psyche plays with its own content, and there you have it: your own life within you, ready to be understood and accessed without reason.

As a society, we live mostly in our rational minds, which is why dreams are often treated with indifference. We’re dreamers by night and rational by day, but our Ego (social persona-identities) resists dealing with the internal world during the day—it only lets us explore the unconscious and emotional side at night. Thank you for your "corage = heart" you pour in your posts, your words go inward and invite emotions to be felt!

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