“When dealing with people remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion” Dale Carnegie

Aisthima is the Greek word for emotion. It gives a kind of deeper meaning to the term than the word ’emotion’ does. Emotion has become a psychological concept but the word ‘aisthima’ still carries a sense of feelings and sensations.

I can never remember a time in my life when I have not been emotional, even sentimental. Perhaps I have always considered emotionality a good thing. In one way or another we are all addicted to emotions. So much so that we become overwhelmed by feelings of love, loss, grief and so on. But are we in danger of over conceptualising what’s going on deep inside our heat and mind. Inevitably science needs to stereotype us into categories of understanding into models and probabilities. But in truth we all experience life completely uniquely from each other. And if there is one generalisation we can make about all of us it’s the fact that we are so completely different from each other. Even when we speak and agree on the same things our individual understanding of these things is different. Sociologists believe that this is because we are each of us the product of different experiences. I think we are all just all inherently different.

Our different approaches to thinking and to life stem from the disparity in the way each of us digest emotions. Every act and every thought is always accompanied by an emotion, however minuscule. Emotion is the colouring we put behind every occurrence in our life.

Emotions are sometimes conscious. But more often unconsciously triggered by past conditioning. Every emotion creates an energy within us. Too often we find this energy uncomfortable so we push it down into the recesses of our subconscious. We often forget about it, but it doesn’t forget about us.

The accumulation of these uncomfortable emotions in our subconscious gives rise to a kind of emotional toxicity. Causing us to react to life often disproportionately. These hidden feelings are somehow always waiting to be released like the lid on a pressure cooker. As the phrase goes “we let off steam”. In so doing we sometimes ruin relationships with people or make the wrong choices, because we may say the wrong thing or over exaggerate. Which then leads to feelings of guilt which again become embedded in our subconscious. Sometimes these emotions when they are too painful to bear are transmuted in our subconscious into some other emotion. So guilt becomes self unworthiness. Fear becomes anger and so on.

For all the fears of contemporary  science we are not very good at releasing these hidden toxic emotions. It is no wonder that we suffer from so much internal stress and tension. So much so that releasing tension is now equated with pleasure and happiness itself.