Emotion Landscape
Emotion Landscape: The scenery and the use of this picture was inspired by a teacher who wanted to draw out her second graders by asking them to draw a picture of something that made them happy. She took the pictures that the individual students had drawn and displayed them on a wall. The following day the children came in to classroom and were observed going to not their own pictures but to different ones.
Upon inquiring what was happening, the teacher learned that the children had different feelings and emotions from the day before and were being drawn to different pictures that were more in tune with what they were currently feeling.
This was an “AHA” moment for the teacher and she began to use different art to get at the feelings and emotions of her students.
She realized that by using art to depict different emotions, she and her students could more easily ( sometimes without words) communicate what they were feeling.
The landscape featured for LVEP is an art student’s rendering of a host of different “feeling landscapes”. It is used to help us all remember what emotions we are experiencing.
The Power of Emotions and Feelings:
The next frontier of human evolution is about understanding how to better use the power of emotion to enhance the quality of our life experiences, improve health and ultimately find solutions to personal and societal problems.
In order to effectively utilize the amazing power of emotion we need to become very conscious of which emotions add quality to our lives and which ones don't.
As we learn how to shift , we have a much greater ability to change our emotional state. We can start calling the shots on what emotion we want to feel rather than simply having emotional reactions, positive or negative. We can build new emotional habits and start to change our emotional diet.
An important first step is to become more aware of how you feel. Many people go through the whole day registering emotions only on a surface level unaware of the emotional under currents affecting them.
In order to gain new insight about your emotions you need to become more aware of what's going on in your feeling world. This isn't hard to do, but it does require slowing down from time-to-time and taking stock. Try this. Periodically, throughout the day simply pause and notice how you feel. It takes only a few seconds to ask, "What am I feeling right now?" Don't judge whatever you are feeling; just observe what's flowing through your emotions. You'll discover new things about your emotional patterns and what things trigger less desirable emotions. This new emotional self-awareness provides the foundation for learning what needs to be shifted.
