The Feeling Wheel

Here are my many reflections that I bundle up, after attending (despite my awful-groggy voice and my perpetual bouts of coughing) my first class of  Interpersonal Communication and Listening Skills (Module One) course at Parivarthan. 

To say the least the first session has surely opened an accelerating feeling -  that will open up opportunities of empowerment in the seven weeks of the course.

Parivarthan is a Counselling, Training and Research Center that offers counselling for children, adolescents and individuals, where their training is geared to help towards human development and life skills. Of particular interest is that they conduct research in the area of mental health.

The course I am attending emphasizes on personal growth of an individual through "pertinent" tools of self-awareness. I am sure this reflective space will go a long way in improving not just my approach to mediating with the world, but also consolidate my strengths to engage in communities comprehensively and holistically. 

What I take home from day one is the insights into ones own "Feeling Wheel". Often one is not in touch with ones feeling - we are programmed culturally not be to be in touch with our feelings. Being in touch with "feelings" is to be emotional. Being "emotional" means being soft, and allowing the "intellect" to cave in to emotions!  The feeling wheel surely broadens our vocabulary to the many nuances of over a hundred different nuanced meanings for different shades of emotions! Today with the shrinking language, we  we surely have shrink our experiences by uttering just a few "colloquial" expressions. Take the example of the word OK. It means many things and yet not. It means anything depending on the lines of: alright, well, good, not so good but just about good, maybe, a question - more often a statement in itself! Phew! so much for just this word!

As one delves in to listening simply to the self, several "Trigger Points" come to the surface. The trigger points that is  cumulative of life's experiences - that we have acquired, and that of what we are born into.

Being aware of trigger points, one starts thinking about the I. It further expands ones thinking and forcing one to examine ones relationship with the environment. 

When I mean Trigger Points, I mean that there are several trigger points in each of us - our age, our name, our birth order, then the caste, creed, religion, spirituality to the more social - Family structure, school, college, memories of travel, habits, friends, work. Each of us will have several trigger points that are a repository of feelings and experiences that are unique - and that can bring a flood of positive and not so positive emotions.

Today, a "Date with I"  gave me a chance to re-visit some of them. I am sure I will be re-visiting many more of these in the days to come. This is a wonderful exercise to mediate, engage and perhaps look at things from multiple angles at situations that befell us with experience, those often not necessarily pleasant. 

I realize that the I alters all the time. There are moments when we discover a different I, that was not necessarily the same a few minutes ago, and perhaps will not be the same after the “THIS” moment passes on to the other. 

Our moments of greatest strength is in stark opposition of our greatest weakness. 

Through this changing I, often in a continuum of  change, conflict and alteration, one can say that the I is dynamic. It is never static. Thanks to the trigger points that have allowed fossils of emotions to bury within the I-US in time.

The emotional residue remains day after day, year after year, and with this shifts the I.   

I guess, today was entirely a "date with I".  This provided a meeting with 13 wonderful people - who have sometimes the same and yet unique experiences. 

This journey of deep introspection will  provide me the tools to engage with every “relationship transaction” more effectively. This I am sure will go a long way in helping me in my interaction with children. 

My working with children in need of care and protection will be the wheel of time that will expand an exhilarated,  creative, aware and mindful journey, through my life and beyond.

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