THE FLUID LIFE
This paper is to be joined with another paper on-line: Work, Play, Love, Appreciation and Creativity. Those five are fluid activities and mind-absorbing realities that structure a person's hours in the most fulfilling manner.
In this paper we concentrate upon dynamics, or the energy flow within. Let's begin with a picture. First, identify the six SASHET feelings as colors: blue is sad, red is angry, green is scared, yellow is happiness, orange is excited, and purple is tender. Imagine huge cans of those feeling colors being poured next to each other on a slow moving glacier. The glacier moves in its mighty manner down the landscape with the colors assuming a winding, beautiful painting on snow.
Well, the above metaphor is stretched a bit but the idea is there. Namely, on the field of our lives SASHET feelings are the moving inner realities. As in every life some rain must fall, so, too, will there be sadness, sadness due to grieving loved ones who die, sadness of the loss of the familiar, sadness at season change, sadness of the loss of eras of our life as we move on. Tears may be appropriate and even sobbing for great losses. The body wants to be fluid and, across the eons of evolution, has developed a survival strategy where the body needs to exit its truly felt grief. A streak of blue, then, weaves on the texture of the snow as we progress to the sea.
There is also red anger in everyone's life. Some try to deny it and others exaggerate it beyond normalcy, but there are occasions when boundary lines of integrity and personhood are crossed by others and the result, internally, is a flash of redness. If someone we love is threatened or hurt, we sense anger rising within. Certainly, anger may be a micro-second after scare and, for those who want to be truly free, they must learn to acknowledge the scare. Still, once the anger is flowing it, too, needs to be released. Lions roar, snakes hiss, buzzards vomit, and dogs bark. Humans need to find sound or appropriate release for their bodies, also. No one lives in such a pure world that a streak of red does not occasionally appear on the landscape.
Scare, as Freud pointed out in his anxiety papers, is usually the bottom emotion in those undelivered from childhood. Certainly, in every life some green appears. Whenever the body or soul is threatened, a flash of scare echoes through the body. It is an old survival tactic. It calls forth fight or flight syndromes, though some humans freeze when they do not know how to give the body its due response. Scare is released by shuddering and shaking and making sound. All too often, men immediately move to anger, causing family crises, because they do not know how to have fluidity by dealing with the first emotion and honestly dealing with it aloud.
Happiness, the golden emotion, is also marked by fluidity in that people have a sense of singing pleasantness within. This is the fundamental feeling for those who have freed themselves from the negative remnants of childhood. Experience in psychotherapy shows that those who leave the ugliness behind them inevitably arrive at a kind of mellow, buzzing golden happiness. Rather than sounding facile, it needs to be known that some childhoods are so abusive, time in therapy is needed and the victory of happiness hard-won. Gold, a flow of gold, is the way adult life needs to be lived (and, in ideal situations) as well as childhood. It is the task of adults to provide sufficient security and healthy options so a child can experience happiness as the ground feeling.
Orange is used for excitement because it is such a celebratory color. This emotion is filled with jumping thrills and great anticipation. It is kids before the presents are opened, revelers at festivals, party-party, crowds filled with singing at musical events, and parades with grand floats and marching bands. Excitement is special. Unfortunately, there are societies and religions, even, that are scared of excitement because it is equated with sexuality. In some areas, excitement is okay for men to experience, but not women. Still, if one is to have a fluid emotional life, the body needs to express itself with raw joy, and, not just on special occasions, but frequently. Orange is part of the landscape and it is definitely desirable.
The last color of the fluid life is purple tenderness. In our original image of the glacier, imagine purple as spreading far out with its ribbon of color. This feeling is for those who have left narcissism and have moved to love. It is perfectly natural for everyone, though there are some who are so wounded and lost in the maze of frozen childhood emotions, that it remains unacknowledged. Tenderness is what you feel when first picking up a baby, it is the compassionate emotion when another human is in trouble, it undergirds all meaningful love relationships, and it needs to be recognized as the most important ground feeling for those who desire lasting intimacy.
A few more hints on a fluid emotional life are valuable. If you find yourself stuck frequently in either sadness, anger, or scare, most probably, you are re-cycling a childhood situation and are not in the here and now. The exceptions to that are when you have a major grief situation that lasts over a period of time; when you are trapped socially or in a job where your personhood is continually discounted but your survival is at stake; when abandonment may occur if you express yourself. As for the lighter emotions of happiness, excitement and tenderness, if you discover that you are pushing one of those in an artificial manner, you most probably got strokes as a child for being the happy kid, the joy child, or the mush tender Rescuer.
The point of fluidity is that you are flowing within yourself as situations occur and as you take charge of your environment making sure that you may feel as your body will. For many, nay most, this is not easy to achieve. First, one must rid one's self of adaptations made earlier in life. Others need to confront when erratic modules come forth, especially when the tendency is to act out the role of a mom or a dad. It takes a lot of courage to know how to be real, honest, sharing, and deep to the core of real feelings.
Finally, the course of a person's life is well described as a journey. Sometimes we lose our way due to the demands of survival and providing for a family. To make sure that the journey is always advancing, there are five areas to keep balancing: Work, Play, Love, Appreciation and Creativity.
