On emotional healing — moods vs. emotions
April 13, 2007
An essential key to emotional healing, or any healing, is the ability to experience our emotions fully. Seems like that should be simple, but it’s not. We’re incredibly complex beings whose past conditioning often makes the experience of emotions complicated. From the point of view of energy medicine, emotions are a form of energy and energy needs to flow freely for health. When emotional energy is moving unobstructed, an emotion will be felt with clarity and intensity and will be short-lived.
What happens when the emotions cannot be experienced in this way? My sense is that not only would the obstructed energy impact the body, but we would also experience it subjectively in the form of “moods”. For example, I feel that depression can sometimes be accounted for by the inability to feel sadness and grief fully. The energy that would have been felt as sadness accumulates when it is repressed and is then experienced as depression. In this model, sadness would be a primary human emotion and depression would be a mood.
I first began to think in terms of moods and emotions when I attended a workshop several years ago with a physician who studied with David Berenson, MD. Berenson trained as a psychiatrist and family therapist and has spent many years developing what he calls the “Map of Emotions”. He distinguishes between true human feelings and moods which are thoughts permeated with feeling. The Map of Emotions details which emotions are the foundation for which moods and names the various moods and emotions we experience in great detail. The essence of the workshop was that healing requires that we be able to experience the pure emotion all the way through in order to allow the moods to be resolved. We worked with a simple process in pairs to allow this to happen.
I haven’t been able to find anything in writing about Berenson’s work and certainly don’t feel I can represent his thinking. The distinction between moods and emotions, however, has stuck with me.
It can be very useful to learn to distinguish emotions and moods in ourselves. The mood can be resolved by locating the raw emotion within it. If moods are “thoughts permeated with feeling”, we can disentangle the feeling from the thought by bringing our awareness to the feeling. Simply experiencing the feeling all the way allows it to move through and the mood can be resolved.
Moods extend in time and they color our perceptions and evaluation of things. Mental involvement with the emotion keeps the energy from being released. The key to a healthy emotional life is the ability to allow the emotions to be experienced freely. To do this, we need to let the mind take a back seat and trust the natural flow of life as it expresses itself in emotion.
(I’ve created a guided meditation on my Meditation Oasis podcast called “Emotional Ease” which is designed to help the emotions to flow freely. You can hear it at iTunes or by following this link.)