Emotions: Choose Well

Sadness: A Spiritual Matter

Sadness is our spirit's response to our own or another's loss. 

It's unavoidable. We cannot go from our mother's womb to our own tomb without experiencing loss and sadness. It's a natural, normal, and appropriate response to loss.

The loss could be a death, an illness or injury, something we valued, the end of a relationship with someone we cared about, or any other kind of loss.

We often feel sadness in our chest. We might feel it as a heaviness, dull ache, or pain. We might speak of our heart feeling empty, wounded, or broken. Perhaps we've known of someone who "died of a broken heart."

Heart is synonymous with spirit. To die of a broken heart is to die due to the loss of what makes us alive, our spirit.

Since sadness has more to do with our thumos, our spirit, than our psyche and mind, it's more a thumological than psychological event.

Sadness can be acute, sudden, and relatively short-lived. It can also be chronic to the point of being the thumic norm of one's spirit.

As with other emotions, sadness can be either life-denying or life-affirming. Perhaps it's both.

Sadness is a weakening or ending of our spirit. As such it threatens or ends and therefore denies our life. However, it's also life-affirming because it expresses the value of life and affirms it. If we did not value life and its pleasures we would not feel sadness in response to its losses. 

So, when we experience loss, let's feel sad. Let's fully accept our sadness. But let us also find ways to cope and comfort ourselves lest our sadness significantly weaken our life or even end it. 

When we die of sadness, we put others at risk of the same.

Emotions: Up-stirrings of Our Spirit

Etymology of Emotion

To understand our emotions it can be helpful to explore the etymology of the word:

Our word "emotion" comes from Old French emouvoir "stir up" which comes from Latin emovere "move out, remove, agitate." Emovere is the sum of ex- "out" + movere "to move." 

The image of emotion is of something being stirred up and moving outward rather than inward, upward, downward or any other direction. 

The first recorded use of "emotion" to refer to a strong inner feeling was in the 1650s. It was used to refer to any inner feeling by 1808..

In other words, "emotion" originally referred  to external movements and stirrings and was applied metaphorically to the inner up stirrings we now call our emotions. Its metaphorical use is relatively recent and modern.

What is Stirred Up and Moves Outward?

So, what exactly is moved and stirred up when we feel emotions?

Is it our mind that is stirred up? I don't think so. What gets stirred up in our mind is our thoughts. 

Is it our body that is stirred up? I don't think so because we can experience the up stirring we call emotions and remain motionless. 

I think it's our spirit, that which makes us alive. Our spirit is stirred up, moved, or agitated and moves from within us outward to be expressed in our words and physical movements.    

Stimuli of Our Spirit

What stirs up our spirit? I suggest that our spirit responds to stimuli that either affirm or deny it. 

Stimuli that affirm our spirit support and sustain our spirit, our aliveness. We welcome such stimuli and call such stirrings joy, happiness, gratitude, excitement, fear, guilt, and sorrow. When we feel such stirrings we feel more alive, more spirited.

Stimuli that deny our spirit suppress and threaten our spirit, our aliveness. We resist such stimuli and call such stirrings fear, anger, sadness, guilt, loneliness, and despair. When we feel such stirrings we feel less alive, less spirited.

So, in my view our emotions are less about our minds and psychology and more about our spirits and thumology.