I am 77. Sent you an email. Understand if you don’t bother reading this but loved your emotion-mood wheel. Can be useful. Anyway since 1974 I have used a regular practice of crying-mindfully to prevent depression, eliminate mood swings, and dissolve stress-installed thought and behavior patterns. Scientific research has demonstrated the value of meditation and mindfulness. It will do the same for crying. No one should be deprived of its consistent benefits - we must show proof that the stigma on crying has to be reversed if we ever want to be universally rational. I deas here…but will order book so can set up research and find fellow subjects:
THE PRACTICE OF MINDFUL CRYING - WHAT YOU WILL LEARN. BASIC VIEWPOINTS. SKILLS ARE ON A SEPARATE PAGE.
Practitioners learn the difference between feeling feelings, which motivate, and experiencing emotions, which inform and require tears. They learn to resist their social conditioning to avoid painful emotions and instead use well-refined embodiment skills and the attention of one watcher to activate emotion so that each discrete suppressed emotion can be directly experienced with acute introspective awareness. The skills practiced include: (1) how to prolong the experience of each discrete arising emotion so that all associated sounds, words, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and images can be addressed thoroughly; (2) how to maintain conscious awareness of all arising mental phenomena; (3) how to attend to/experience the stream-of-consciousness when it arises and even pause crying, report what is happening, then return to the previous emotional state; and, (4) what to do when a cognitive-emotional cycle is completed. If you already possess sharp concentration and introspection skills and can deeply sense your body and attention, your first experiment with emotional mindfulness, which requires at least one partner and at least 6 minutes each, will probably produce a result…I can’t predict what. (If you already are comfortable with intense emotion and suddenly access the stream-of-consciousness, your experiences may startle you. Opening your eyes, looking at your partner(s), examining your surroundings, and talking will likely cancel it. Because you cry, whatever the experience, it will be stress-reducing, integrative, and transformational.)
VIEWPOINT #1―We may possess a fight/flight/freeze rat/rabbit brain but evolution/Creation, in all its brilliance, provided us with this mind-boggling naturally corrective biological mechanism or process of crying. It comprehensively reduces physical and psychological stress (tension, pressure, strain, emotional pain), enables us to identify and extinguish unhelpful trauma-conditioned responses, integrates information when we consciously and mindfully experience our emotions, yields all of the emotions that make us human and humane (especially, affection, tenderness, empathy, compassion, and love and even foresight), and plays a major role at each stage of our cognitive-emotional development and maturation, or it would— when we allow it to do so. Tragically, this stigmatized and avoided integrative process, crying-with-attention, likely is the mechanism that prepares us for and then enables each stage of our physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual development. I have good reasons for believing this.
VIEWPOINT #2―To assure our lifelong use of this process we inherit three basic socializing and intelligence/emotion-stimulating drives which are obvious during our infancy and babyhood. They are to instinctively: (1) seek and receive attention (aware attention stimulates the brain and activates emotion), (2) communicate with living entities (language in any form!!), and (3) consciously, with full awareness experience emotion(s) while receiving silent, respectful, approving attention.
VIEWPOINT #3―My experiences suggest the following: (1) that aware attention we receive during crying yields the precise information integration that we must have if we are to understand our experiences and interact with-and-in Reality with wisdom, compassion, and empathy; (2) that comprehensive integration occurs only when we deeply experience any previously suppressed discrete emotion to the precise degree of intensity with which it consciously or unconsciously was originally felt (takes seconds); (3) that for thorough integration we must experience our emotions with 100% conscious awareness of sensations, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and imagery; and, (4) that for this process to truly fulfill its socializing purpose we must report aloud to at least one watcher (partner) each arising word, sentence, thought, image, feeling, and emotion (this is a discipline). During practice we must not try to explain anything as that will distract us.