by Jenny Rose | Jan 20, 2024 | Emotional Intelligence, Feelings
(Due to a technical glitch, most of you were not notified when I last posted. You can follow this link to read the post if you missed it. I think the problem is fixed now!)
As so often happens, several threads came together to weave this post. The first was a suggestion from Seth Godin to follow our wandering mind, as that’s where our heart might be.
On first read, I smiled and thought “of course,” because following my imagination is one of my greatest pleasures.
As I considered it over a period of days, however, noting where my mind wanders, I discovered something.
Photo by John Salvino on Unsplash
I happily follow my wandering mind as long as I feel undisturbed about where it goes. The minute I start to get uncomfortable, however, I shackle it. Brutally. This might be with distraction, compulsive productivity, or starting to speed. A lot of people eat, overexercise, or get trapped in substance abuse. Let us count the ways!
I have rules about where my mind is allowed to go. I enforce my rules without mercy, in collaboration with draconian internal voices. My rigidity is not so much about my thoughts wandering as it is the feelings I have about my thoughts. This is emotional intelligence 101, and I’ve written about it before.
Thoughts and feelings are not the same thing.
In essence, then, I’m putting a lid on my feelings. Again. Still.
Sigh.
It doesn’t work. It never works, and I know this, but I do it anyway.
I do it for the same reason we all attempt to avoid painful feelings. They’re painful! Avoidance is easier than allowing ourselves to feel them, find healthy ways to express them, and let them go.
How many thoughts do we have in a day? I suspect most of us chew on the same preoccupations day after day, whether our thoughts engender feelings of rage, grief, fear, or shame, or a combination du jour. Uncomfortable territory. Also highly addictive territory. I’m chagrined to admit my own attraction to struggle. It’s so easy! Which is ridiculous, because it makes everything much, much harder than it needs to be, physically, emotionally, and generally.
Maybe what I mean is it’s so familiar!
As humans, we have an irresistible compulsion to notice, emphasize, and dwell upon the negative rather than the positive. That’s why so many people find relief in a gratitude practice, including me. Switching from a negative to positive focus requires mindfulness and mental effort, but the relief from anxiety and stress is immediate.
I should do it more often. Like ten times a day.
Understand, I’m not suggesting we avoid our feelings. I’m suggesting we take control of our thoughts, especially the negative kind. Feelings rise and fall inescapably. They’re biochemical messages from our physical bodies. We were made to have feelings. What we do with them, of course, is well within our control. Thoughts, however, are ours to steer.
Feelings, though arising naturally, are contagious and easily manipulated. That’s why advertising and social pressure work so well. Our feelings can be deliberately manufactured to serve those who would control our money, our votes, and our humanity.
On the other hand, this means we can to some degree manipulate our own feelings with our thoughts.
I came across an article by writer and speaker Rob Henderson, who I follow on Substack. He wrote a piece listing lessons he’s learned during a challenging life, beginning in the foster care system. One of the lessons is “you are what you do.” Not what you feel, but what you do.
I thought immediately of my writing community on Substack, where each of us struggles with what it means to be a writer. I don’t speak for anyone else, but I’ve called myself a writer ever since I began writing. Writers write. That’s what I do.
I like to keep things simple (even though I often don’t, which is a perfect example of what I say versus what I do!)
Photo by Alex Iby on Unsplash
We are what we do. I agree. We are not entirely defined by what we think and feel. I’ve known that ever since I went through emotional intelligence training. We’re also not defined by who we say we are, or who others say we are. We are not our highly polished and desperately maintained identity. Our true thoughts and feelings, the private stuff no one else can see or hear, steer our choices and actions, and those are what truly reveal our most authentic selves.
It follows if we want to change, we must do things differently. As many others have discovered long before me, true change comes from the inside out. If we manage our thoughts and feelings in healthy ways, our actions change. That’s why short-term strategies like diets often fail. A temporary diet does not address our broken relationship with food, a much harder proposition to tackle.
We seem to be on a giant rack, ever widening, between who we think we should be or must be and who we really are. The struggle and tension threaten to tear us apart, yet we cling to our rack, desperately holding ourselves together, too afraid to relax into who we really are and make peace with our true selves.
In a constant state of tension, we don’t let our minds wander. We can’t afford to. We don’t have access to the peace and quiet or even boredom a wandering mind requires. Our technology has erased the fertile ground of boredom, particularly for our children. We feed our hearts a diet of distraction, manufactured drama, busyness and productivity; a hunger for more, bigger, better, newer things, and expect it to be satisfied. We ignore or numb our feelings, or turn them into destruction of ourselves and others.
I often think of this Chinese proverb:
Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.
Toxic positivity is not an effective coping mechanism. Nor is a state of deep depression and withdrawal, as in addiction. I want to find a path between the two.
Perhaps my wandering mind knows the path and will point the way if I allow it to. Perhaps our minds know exactly where our hearts are but we’re too afraid to know.
Questions:
- When your mind wanders, where does it go?
- How do you feel about where your mind wanders?
- How do you think an inability to focus (distractibility) might in some cases be connected to a refusal to follow the guidance of mind and heart?
Leave a comment below!
To read my fiction, serially published free every week, go here: 
by Jenny Rose | Dec 24, 2022 | Connection & Community, Emotional Intelligence
I’m continuing to play with blind journaling. It’s most useful when I notice physical and emotional signs of anxiety and speeding but am not sure what’s triggered them. Taking off my glasses, turning off the light (I journal early in the morning while it’s still dark), and concentrating on feeling out the roots of my symptoms leads me to the source of my distress. Doing this when I first notice symptoms interrupts the spiral of anxiety that might otherwise follow and increase during the day.
Photo by Nicole Mason on Unsplash
It works much better than distraction, like playing solitaire, which I’m still refraining from doing.
I think it will also be a great tool for concentrated writing time when I want to explore a prompt or address a specific scene or exchange of dialog.
I’ve been wondering this week how things might change if we were blind. All of us. A blind world.
A significant part of our brain is tied to interpreting the endless barrage of information coming through our eyes. Not only does life spool before us every waking hour, we add unmeasurable visual information as we look at our screens and consume media.
I notice how much simpler, less stimulating, and less distracting life is when I shut my eyes. There is a cool, spacious space between sleep and eyes open. It’s quiet in that space. I’ve written about visual noise before, which I’m particularly sensitive to. When I close my eyes, I immediately feel quieter. My attention is not demanded by visual input. I can come into presence with myself more easily. No surprise we meditate with our eyes closed.
My favorite sense is touch. Vision can lie, as can words we hear, but touch is honest. I can read pain in the way a friend holds her body, in her skin color, in a thousand subtle nonverbal visual signs if I pay attention, but touch, oh, touch gives me a flood of information that cannot be faked or hidden. When I practice healing touch, I often do it with my eyes closed. As a lover, I prefer no visual input, not because I’m hiding or uncomfortable with intimacy, but because touch is for me the most powerful and ecstatic love language. Readers of my fiction will see that reflected clearly in my writing.
It is through touch I have communicated my love and affection for animals; for children, lovers, and friends; for the natural world. My empathy and compassion flower with touch, as do tolerance and respect. In touch, in breath, in heartbeat, we are all connected. Flesh over bone. Hair. The landscape of a living body. Texture of stone, wood, water, earth, ice, plant.
Photo by Liane Metzler on Unsplash
Though blind, we would still hear. We could speak and listen. How uncluttered would our hearing be if we couldn’t see who we were speaking to, and if they couldn’t see us? No more written social media. No more selfies and digitally altered pics. No more dating profiles with pics. We’d be forced to actually speak to one another, whether on the phone or face to face. I suppose speech recognition AI would immediately fill this gap, though. No emojis – we’d have to communicate our feelings in real words. Barring AI, our jokes would sound like jokes. Our scorn would sound like scorn. Our sympathy would sound like sympathy. Our speech patterns and intonation would convey meaning in a way words on a screen never can.
It would be a world in which guns were useless.
We would be unable to see clothing, MAGA hats, skin color, tattoos, piercings, or anything else to which we attach sweeping generalizations or bigotry. We could assess only voice, touch, scent.
Scent is so much subtler than vision we often ignore it, but this sense can give us lots of information. We might smell of food, alcohol, cigarettes, cannabis, unwashed skin and clothes, urine or feces, sweat, sex. Sometimes sickness has a smell. Poor dental hygiene has a smell. A clean, healthy, vigorous person smells different than a dirty, ailing person. Smell, like touch, doesn’t lie. A closet drinker or smoker would be obvious, in spite of their words of denial. Ironically, without vision much of our cover would be blown.
If the whole of humanity was struck blind, capitalism as we practice it would come to an end. We would no longer be bombarded with images of products or people (or people as products). We would no longer compare houses, cars, things, body shapes, eye colors, hair colors. Most of the ways we proclaim our identity to the world would be swept away. Many of our perceived differences would literally vanish. We would no longer be burdened with visual standards of ugliness or beauty. In one stroke we would be pared down to our shared humanity: our choices, our behavior, our ability to cooperate and socialize with others, our skills, our integrity, our feelings. Visual pretense and presentation would no longer shield us; we would cease to be manipulated and our power to manipulate others would diminish significantly.
Photo by Frank Okay on Unsplash
No more NFT trading cards.
What a shame.
As I work with this exercise of imagination, I feel sad. Vision is such a miraculous gift, and beauty so nourishing. But we don’t always use it as a gift. We use it as a tool with which to make money, with which to hurt others, and with which to hurt ourselves. Most of us take our visual-oriented culture for granted and never give it a thought at all.
I also feel afraid. Our visual sense is so chaotic, so inexorable and powerful; we rely on it for most of our choices and beliefs. But vision lies. Increasingly, it misleads. AI is becoming more effective. Deep fakes are harder to spot. Advertising is ever-more powerful. And we nestle more and more deeply into the matrix, seduced and shackled to the surface of things, the presentation.
What would it be like if the world was blind? Would we then access deeper levels of our shared humanity and connection to one another?
Imagine My Surprise
Imagine my surprise,
sitting a full hour
in silent and irremediable
fear of the world,
to find the body
forgetting
its own fear the instant
it opened and placed
those unassuming hands
on life’s enduring pain,
and the world for one
moment
closed its terrifying eyes
in gratitude.
Saying,
“This is my body, I am found.”
–David Whyte
On a personal note, I’ve decided to transition to posting on Harvesting Stones biweekly rather than weekly going forward. I’ll continue to serial publish on Substack weekly.
Questions:
What is your favorite sense? Why?
What sensory input do you trust the most?
How would you feel about your body if you had never seen yourself?
How would you feel about your body if you had never seen another’s?
Leave a comment below!
To read my fiction, serially published free every week, go here:
by Jenny Rose | Sep 17, 2022 | Connection & Community, Emotional Intelligence
It’s in the moment we take our eyes off the road and the car in front of us to reach for our water bottle that it happens.
It’s in the moment we’re preoccupied with our distress over a fight we had with a loved one before we came to work that we miss something key in the meeting.
It’s the moment of emotional reaction, the moment of distraction, the moment in which we’re trying to manage our feelings that provides an opening for accident, miscommunication, injury, even violence.
Windows are openings in boundaries, in walls and barriers and closed, airless cells. They allow egress and entry, movement. Sometimes air, sunshine, and birdsong come in and our best selves go out. Sometimes monsters and demons crawl in and our worst selves go out.
Photo by Craig Whitehead on Unsplash
Predators of all kinds look for windows, openings in our defenses, in our boundaries. Windows that can be cracked, wedged, broken, pried. Their tools are ideology, lies, personal attacks, misdirection, denial, silencing, and threats.
If our emotions can be controlled, if distrust and drama can be manufactured, if we can be put on the defensive, our windows become open holes. We are no longer able to open and close them at will, control what comes in and what goes out.
When our ability to think critically and be proactive is overwhelmed by our reactions and defenses, we cannot make thoughtful choices. We no longer have the energy and presence to look, listen, feel, and think about what we’re hearing or seeing. Our emotions hold us captive, and whoever controls our emotions has our power.
Emotional manipulation is seductive. We become attached to exercising our outrage. Our fear is addictive, so addictive we employ denial and cling frantically to what we want to believe, what we want to hear.
Predators need not show their work, cite their sources, or back up their assertions. They need not tell the truth or undergo the tension of collaboration and cooperation. They don’t need to waste their time with civil discourse, learning new information, or considering other points of view.
All they need is a lust for power and an open window. Like the screen you’re reading this on.
Oppositional energy and inflammatory language are short cuts, toxic mimics for true discourse and contribution. They provide a hiding place for those hunting for power and control, those unable to think critically or master information.
If we’re busy arguing, defending, and being distracted by our emotional hijack, we can’t evaluate situations and people clearly. If we can’t get a grip on a situation, perhaps somewhere in the background a predator has jimmied a window or two and successfully invaded our house.
Toss them out.
And then let’s repair our windows.
Photo by Henry Be on Unsplash
by Jenny Rose | Dec 7, 2017 | A Flourishing Woman, Mind
Scrying is “the practice of looking into a suitable medium in the hope of detecting significant messages or visions.” (Wikipedia)
My laptop has developed the Technical Flu and is in the shop. I’m chagrined to discover how much I depend on it. It’s the only portable device I have, as I still resist the pressure to obtain even a cell phone. Suddenly, my access to music, DVDs and the Internet is restricted. I know, it’s a first world problem, but I’m not complaining. I whined for the first few days, but as I sit down to write this post what I mostly feel is a kind of grateful wonder.
In my laptop’s absence I find a lot of quiet. Without my usual entertainment and distraction, my ears, eyes and attention are freed. As I work on the second book of my series, I’ve picked up a sketch pad and colored pencils in order to create a map of my very complex world where the myth, fairy tale and oral history of several cultures meet and interact. Without access to my one-dimensional outline on my word processor, I recognize the need for a two or even three-dimensional model to truly show all the connections and correspondences of the series. I’ve discovered new depths to my creative vision and work and considered new ways to approach it.
Photo by Ludde Lorentz on Unsplash
Folk and fairy tales often speak of depths. Caves, tunnels, wells and stairways descend to other places, magical underground kingdoms where evil beings lurk and flex their destructive forces and unexpected but powerful animals or crones or fairies save the hero or heroine. Gypsies, oracles, shamans and seers scry crystal balls or pools of water, smoke, fire, mirrors or stones. Runes whisper messages. Tarot cards reveal enigmatic insight.
We are in the depths of seasonal darkness now. In two weeks the light begins to return. Here in Maine the day starts to fade at 3:30 in the afternoon and an hour later it’s full dark. What do the depths of darkness hold? What lies between the stars? What dreams unfold behind our eyelids during the long sleeping hours? What lives, hunts and dies in the winter-bare forests under the moon? What stirs in the dark sea’s deeps?
If we could separate ourselves and all those around us from our tech and toys, if we could all free our eyes from the screen and our ears from the noise and look, clear-eyed and undistracted, at those around us, what would we see in one another? If we were forced to sit quietly at a window with nothing but a chair for company, what might we discover in the world around us? If we stand naked and alone in front of a mirror and look into our own eyes, what looks back at us?
What lies in the depths of longing and loss? What lies denied and amputated in the deeps of a soul? What waits to be rediscovered or reclaimed, healed or released?
Some of the deepest, darkest, coldest and most fearsome depths in my life turned out to be only ankle-deep after all. Ankle deep and unpleasant, but, once challenged and understood, pathetic and sad rather than powerful and terrible. Shallows pretending to be depths. A leech or two instead of a sea monster.
Other shallows are so seductive, so enticing, so shiny, that we joyously bare our feet and run into them, gradually wading farther and farther from shore, our attention captured, our gaze fixed on their captivating surface, and there we stay until we die.
All my life I’ve been told I’m too intense. I’ve never known exactly what that means, and the criticism never fails to both hurt and irritate, especially as I can’t get more information. Asking probing questions is simply an example of my obnoxious intensity, it appears.
I wonder this morning if what people are expressing is discomfort with my love for the depths, for the dark where miracles happen, for the hidden thing, be it dreadful or dazzling. Questioning is falling out of social favor. Political correctness shackles and gags us. The shiny shallows are the place to be, where text messages, emojis and ‘likes’ glitter and frolic and algorithms and ideology teach us what to think, believe, value and buy.
Photo by Ryan Hutton on Unsplash
I can be seduced by the shallows as well as anyone, and have several times been fooled by them, but somewhere inside me resides a wild thing, a female creature that glories in the power of the dark and deep and always returns to passion, emotion, and creativity. I want to dive into the night sky and swim naked among the stars and nebulae. I want to see and be seen, hear and be heard, know and be known. I navigate with a mouthful of questions and an insatiable curiosity. I don’t want life to be pretty and distracting and shiny. I don’t want all my dreams to be sunlit and filled with flowers and kittens.
I want life to be as it is, smelling of musk and blood and starlight, dark and powerful and magnificent beyond my puny imagination. I want the hot eroticism of life and the torn flesh of death. I want to embrace the unknowable, kiss the lips of mystery and reclaim and wield the full power of my fear.
I choose to live in the depths.
Photo by Christopher Campbell on Unsplash
All content on this site ©2017
Jennifer Rose
except where otherwise noted
by Jenny Rose | Oct 12, 2017 | A Flourishing Woman, The Journey
Photo by Autumn Mott on Unsplash
I love autumn, and autumn in New England is particularly poignantly beautiful. The leaves, oh the leaves! It’s as though the trees release their passion in one final gasp of ecstasy before their long sleep. The colors stun the senses with their beauty; it’s almost too much to absorb. Yet the trees’ splendor is fleeting. Inexorably, the leaves fall like golden tears, like blazing sparks, and as they fall the greatest power of all is revealed: The true shape of things.
The green and fiery sea of the forest and fields recedes. Lichen-covered rocks bare themselves. Trees stand or lean in bony beauty, gnarled and hollow, smooth and upright, each species clad in its own color and texture, but now the colors are russet and ivory, shades of brown and grey touched with black. Thorns and stems become semi-transparent cover for winter-colored birds and animals.
The bare forest is everything it is and nothing it is not.
I, too, am becoming reduced to my essential self. Confusion, guilt and shame are loosening their hold on me and drifting away, and I make a resting place for them in my writing. I look back in my memory and, for the first time, begin to see the true shape of things. All the words that weighed me down and kept me small, all the gaslighting and controlling, all the lies and distortions, are responding to some miraculous internal seasonal shift and slant of light. I am bursting into triumphant understanding, and then letting go, letting all that does not serve me fall away. My true shape emerges, and it’s strong and clear-seeing and wise. It always was.
Photo by Erik Stine on Unsplash
Now I begin to see the true shape of things. Now begins a season without pretense, unencumbered by expectations. Now the lineaments of my feelings lie bare. The landscape of my life becomes stark and uncomplicated, a walk through winter woods where a feather is a feather, a quill a quill and a swatch of fur on a thorn exactly what it is, not more, not less, not something else entirely. I reclaim the dignity of my own perception, intuition and experience.
It does not surprise me that traditionally this is the time of year when the veil between the worlds thins, ghosts walk, legends come to life, ancestors are honored, and we acknowledge that which haunts us. I do not fear my ghosts. Indeed, they’re old friends and companions. My bogeymen were flesh and blood concealed beneath dazzling costumes of false power, fearful only as long as their true shape was hidden from me.
Some fear the fading light, endings and truth. Some prefer the riot of distraction and confusion. Some refuse to see or know the true shape of things. My own courage is not strengthened by distraction, no matter how beautiful or seductive. My courage is a thing of unadorned simplicity, spare and clean as bone.
The leaves fall, ravishing, rapturous. At last, the true shape of things emerges from the blaze, pure and indestructible, and I embrace it like a lover.
Photo by Vanessa von Wieding on Unsplash
All content on this site ©2017
Jennifer Rose
except where otherwise noted
