Why Cultivate Emotional Balance? . Those of us who have the pleasure of having children know how frustrating it can be to see them cry because someone has hurt their feelings…
So, we realize how important it is to teach them to defend themselves, but if we fall into the error of teaching them to defend themselves against blows, we may be training a potential aggressive, who later only will know how to defend himself by hitting and humiliating others, by point that one day, it will be you, who is called, because your son presents aggressive behaviors.
Which, obviously, will become a vicious circle from which it will hardly be easy to get out, without getting hurt and really frustrated for not knowing how to defend yourself.
As parents of the future men and women of the world, we have before our eyes the great challenge of cultivating the right balance between heart and mind, between what we feel and think, this balance, which will allow us to live on a planet in peace.
If we start from the root of the word cultivation, it means: “Make it flourish” and exactly that is what I want to express, the challenge is to make a generation flourish that is capable of managing its emotions properly and thus managed to live in harmony.
In my opinion, the best way to protect our children is by teaching them how to manage their emotions, so that they can turn them into skillful and useful means for their harmonious development and evolution.
Understanding, harmony, as the right balance or balance between what we think and feel, that gives us harmony with ourselves and harmony with the environment, which is learning to relate, that is, power and knowing how to communicate what we feel and what that we think, respecting the rights of others and of course our own rights.
I have always thought that we parents are ultimately the best teachers of our children and that the best way to learn is by watching and practicing day by day, parents have the opportunity to teach by doing, children learn by modeling, which supposes to become heroes or heroines to imitate and not to delegate it to the "heroes and heroines" of television.
So what will they imitate? What will they copy?…
Precisely what we teach them day by day with our actions and with our words.
It is clear, surely, that the first ones that we must learn to Cultivate the Emotional Balance, we are the adults, the parents, that today we are the example to follow of millions of children, who look at us and at least expect our protection.
How to cultivate something that we do not know, exactly, what it is?
Very often, we hear talk and even talk about feelings, emotions and behaviors, as if they were the same and even more, without knowing exactly what they are? What do we mean? An emotion or a feeling? What differentiates them ?.
We simply put them in a bag and like in a “Bingo” game, we take from the bag that chip that we believe is the one that will lead us to sing “Bingo!”, That chip or label that we believe qualifies what is happening to us.
Without pretending to make a psychological analysis of the terms, I will simply approach the conceptualization of these, from the simplest language that is achieved in any psychology book on the subject.
In psychology the word feeling is used to define the subjective experiences of individuals and that are the product of their emotions.
We already know that feelings are the result of "emotions" and are a long-lasting affective state.
And what is emotion?
It is a generic term that refers to the adaptation, by individuals, to stimuli caused by another human being, by an animal, some thing or fact in particular.
In my research I learned that emotional states are caused by the release of hormones and neurotransmitters, which later become emotions and later feelings.
Thus, we get, among these chemical agents in the body: Dopamine, Serotonin, Noradrenaline, Cortisol and Oxytocin, as the main "substances" responsible for our emotions.
Psychology has presented a list of basic emotions namely:
- Surprise Disgust Sadness Anger Fear Joy / Happiness
If we continue investigating, we will learn that there are other emotions that derive from these calls, “Basic Emotions”.
In short, it is a broad and complex subject and of which we know little or almost nothing and that paradoxically, has a great influence on our lives, at least on our behavior, to have or not a "Harmonious Life", which offers us greater options for achieve a state of "Happiness".
This happiness, which by the way is more a state of our mind, than one that is obtained as a product of our material well-being, but this is a subject that deserves to be treated in another article.
Knowing how to manage our emotions does not mean repressing them, when we constantly repress our emotions, we can fall into what psychologists have called "an emotional crisis", but if we do not know how to manage them and let them take control of our lives and overflow us, we also we run the risk of finding ourselves in serious trouble.
How to achieve emotional balance?
How can we manage our emotions "intelligently"?
Definitely, I think that the best way is internal and continuous self-observation of ourselves, in order to know how our emotions affect us and how our state of mind influences our behavior.
In conclusion, it is to make the daily and constant effort to know ourselves, in order to achieve a state of self-awareness, it is to stop seeing outside, to see inside of us.
It is learning not to be ashamed of what we feel and to recognize ourselves sincerely.
Know our trends and how we react to them.
Learn that our emotions and feelings are signs that tell us how we are, how our life is.
It is learning to differentiate, feelings of behaviors, because it is not bad to feel, it is what we do with what we feel, in any case what would be questionable.
It is to do the conscious exercise, to recognize the other's emotions, to know how to interpret what is happening to them.
In short, the cultivation of emotional balance begins as the seed you water every day, until it flourishes and turns it into a tree with strong roots and great foliage.
It is conscious self-observation, until we become familiar with what we are, that is to cultivate our own emotional balance, in order to be able to help our own children to do the same, from the heart.
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Fanny Ramírez V.
