Dear First name / friend

 

I think we’re in the confused business of both over-complicating and over-simplifying. Let me explain. 

 

We forget we’re really just an animal species with a few fundamental needs: food, shelter, water and love. But layered on top of that, we have deeply complex psyches and those needs become complicated by war, by parenting, by generational and personal trauma, by political agenda and social and health inequality. Suddenly, our simple needs become deeply complicated.

 

Why am I saying this? Because I feel this battle between the two: between the simplicity of food as fundamental nourishment versus food as something deeply psychological and cultural - as we spoke about last week. I feel the battle between our simple quest to love and be loved and the choices we make about our partner based on parental models and childhood trauma. I think humans - and the human body - are deeply complex but we thrive (literally) with the simplest things.

 

Sometimes our minds function as adults: the selflessness of the parent; the deep intellectualism of the scientific researcher - and yet sometimes we function as our inner child: we are reactive, emotional, frustrated, indignant, stroppy, hurt, insecure.

I was thinking about this because I think we aren’t always very good at identifying our emotional states. 

 

As you know, I keep a notes section on my phone where I jot down ideas for this newsletter, as well as quotes from things I’ve read. Looking back, I noticed that many of these quotes deal with the subtle difference between two things; two emotional states that we often confuse and conflate. For example, Clare Finney in last week's discussed Hungry Heart writes “I was heartbroken, but I was not unloved”. I wrote it down because I thought it was a beautiful turn of phrase. How common is it, I wonder, to feel unloved because you are heartbroken, when actually the two are quite distinct, and you may be one but that does not mean you are the other? 

 

I have spoken in the past about my own difficulties with identifying anger in myself - for me, it never looked like rage or shouting, but as self-criticism. The emotion had become lost in another because I didn’t know how to safely express it. Furthermore, looking back at quotes I wrote down from Women Who Love Too Much (ha), Robin Norwood distinguishes between the expression of sexuality as often, in fact, being an expression of need for validation by another. I recall studying Pride and Prejudice for A-Level English in which one of the central themes of the novel is the idea of love as gratitude; the idea that love follows a deep sense of gratefulness and that there “is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost every attachment”. One thing I have reflected on time and time again, is the distinction between lonely and alone. It is easy to feel that we are lonely, simply because we are alone. “If she pretended hard enough to be a grown up, she could manage to forget she was a frightened child” (Norwood). I remember my sister Lucy telling me this after I broke up with my boyfriend in second year of uni and I complained of feeling lonely. “Just because you're alone”, she said, “doesn't mean you have to be lonely!” It was a revelation. 

 

Mindful moment: How adept are you at identifying your emotions? Are you missing someone, or just thinking about them? Are you lonely, or just alone? Are you tired or in fact, sad? As you begin to dive deeper into your true emotional state, remember above all else, that all emotion is transient. Let it be, and let it go. 

 

We often confuse emotion similarly when it comes to exercise. Are you tired, or are you lethargic? One requires rest, whilst the other requires action.

 

Mindful movement: Which do you need: deep rest and recovery? Or activity and movement?