We are going to look at feelings and emotions. This is one of my favorite hobby horses and I can get quite animated, so hang on!
Our society has become almost completely feeling oriented and I think this is very bad. I have said before that it seems that we have lost the ability to think, and reason. Rare is it to find someone who is willing to risk sticking their neck out for a belief or a thought. Feelings are sacred ground, especially for women. I can say that, I am one of you.
I have a friend who I love dearly who is very feeling oriented and I kid her all the time about it. She feeeeeellls everything. We make each other nuts as she tells me I am an ice princess and I tell her she lives in her emotions. We balance each other out very well as she comes to me to get balance on her thought life, and I check with her to be sure I am humane in my dealings with people :)
So ----we are going to dive into our topic with some gusto here- are you ready?
First thing I want you to think about is this: what are emotions? Have you ever thought about that before? Are they physical? Are they concrete? Where do they come from and why do we have them? These are all questions I hope to have answered for you through this blog.
I believe that emotions are the physical experience of our thought life; the body’s response to thoughts that either please or displease us. I am sure you would agree that we experience billions of thoughts each day. I would further say that our thoughts often provoke emotional responses that relate to what we call happiness, hope, well being or sorrow, despair, fear, or anger.
Where do our emotions come from? To understand this, you have to hang with me a minute while I take a little side trip to explain briefly some background about the origin of emotions.
We are composed of essentially 2 parts- material or physical which is all you can see, and immaterial or spiritual and this is all you cannot see.
No one denies that these two “parts” of us, if you will – interact with each other constantly. Our emotions almost always come from the inner man. The inner man is the place of thought and reason. (Matt. 13:15) It is also the place of feelings or affections (Ecc. 7:9, Isa. 35:4) and our will. Our will is what enables us to make choices and decisions. With me so far?
Emotions are actually chemical reactions in the body brought on by thoughts in the inner man. For example: when you think someone is in the house in the middle of the night, you sit up in bed, your hearing becomes acute, your heart begins to pound faster, your respirations increase, you begin to sweat. All of this began as a thought. Your thought will either prove to be right or wrong, but in either case, your body responded the exact same way.
What has taken place in your body is that when you thought you were in danger a series of chemicals were released from your endocrine system, adrenaline and epinephrine which trigger the release of a hormone that triggers the release of approximately 30 other hormones that prepare your body to fight or take flight. (For those that are really curious on this, the website howstuffworks.com has a great detailed and understandable description of this process.)
Continued tomorrow