Breaking Tides of Sadness


Salawat
I had some meaningful interactions with a person that ultimately left me feeling hollowed out. I usually regulate my emotions pretty well, especially those that originate more within myself rather than a reaction to something external. I hadn’t experienced a breaking-tide emotion in a while.

A breaking tide emotion is a feeling that you don't expect to be as strong as it is; and it has a tendency to disrupt equilibrium. Even if you don’t fall down from it, you still get wet from it—it is sweeping, unexpectedly strong. You don’t mitigate or suppress these feelings, you just experience them and wait till everything's all quiet and empty inside.


Strong feelings make it easy to see the mind-body link. When experiencing stress for a long time or experiencing strongly negative emotion, my physical work capacity drops, and healing time increases. Feelings are intangible, but like air and light, they have exceptionally tangible impacts. Prime among them is exhaustion and symptoms of overtraining. My conception is that you have a global amount of total stress that you can experience. You know this intuitively: you know that you can't do quite as much work when it's blazing hot as you can when it's a cool day. Just in this way, when you're tired or sad or missing someone or grieving something, you feel it with both body and mind.


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