Emotional Wholeness

by Deepak Chopra MD

Being human means having emotions! If we openly and honestly deal with our feelings while they’re occurring we will avoid the accumulation of harmful emotions. We can be further proactive by avoiding harmful chemicals, foods and other poisonous substances from our environments that disturb our well-being and interfere with our energy and creativity. Without protective mechanisms in place, we build a toxic dump within our minds and bodies that prevent us from living a creative, vital and fulfilling life.

In learning to identify the emotional barriers keeping us from reaching our full potential we must first understand the answer to a fundamental question. What is an emotion? Another word we commonly use to describe our emotions is feelings. We use the word feeling because emotions actually generate physical sensations in our bodies. Emotions are the simultaneous experience of thoughts in the mind, with sensations in the body.


Scientists tell us that the average human being thinks approximately 65,000 thoughts a day. The interesting part, however, is that 98 percent of us think the same thoughts we had yesterday. This means that through our thoughts we create daily the same emotions and sensations in the body we had yesterday and the day before.

Our own inner-talk and outer-language reflects our recognition of emotions as physical experiences. Therefore, we need to be very careful about the thoughts we put into our minds and bodies for they create our ultimate reality.

By using expressions such as, Your leaving my heart broken – Your love makes me feel full – Your sarcastic words felt like a kick in my stomach, we are actually describing the physical reality of our emotions. We may think we’re using metaphors, but references to feelings in our heart and gut are tangible and painful experiences. Dealing with emotions in a healthy way means having awareness of the sensations in our body than accompany our experiences.

Few of us have learned how to effectively process our emotions. Therefore, we tend to resort to examples we learned as young children. The patterns developed in our past, and especially from our youth, are dangerous because we don’t even realize that we have them. In addition they may even turn our practical, loving selves into spoiled, selfish children.

Taking Responsibility
The first step to becoming completely present in our life is to identify our emotions and accept responsibility for our feelings. Responsibility means the ability to respond — it doesn’t mean assigning blame or guilt. It means that we can choose how we feel. The more responsible we are the less we tend to spend energy blaming anyone for anything, including ourselves.
Our emotions are our emotions. Unprocessed emotions keep us tied into the past. Ultimately, it’s our individual responsibility how we choose to respond to situations and people in our lives. The outcome of taking ultimate responsibility for our own feelings is freedom. The key is remembering the distinction between taking responsibility for our feelings versus the other person’s behavior — which we can neither be responsible for, nor change. To wait for others to change before we can feel better is to set ourselves up for a long, unfulfilled, miserable time.