🦉 The Wisdom School
The Wisdom School is a podcast by the Perennial Leader Project, an organization dedicated to providing tools for the art of living. Here, you’ll find short clips from the In Search of Wisdom podcast and selected readings from ancient philosophical and spiritual traditions.
Philosophy & Emotions with Krista Thomason
In this episode of The Wisdom School — I share a short clip from my conversation with Krista Thomason (author of Dancing with the Devil). You can expect to learn what philosophy can teach us about working with our emotions and how bad feelings can make life good.
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You wrote in the book, “When bad feelings happen, just feel them.” It seems very straightforward. Why would we do anything otherwise?
Krista Thomason — It sounds super easy, right? It sounds really straightforward to just feel them. But we don't actually do that as much as you think. Many times, we have a million different reactions to our negative emotions. One of them is, oh, you know, I start feeling envious, and I go, ‘Oh gosh, I really shouldn't do that.’
And I try to talk myself out of it really quick. And I say, that's not the right way to feel. I shouldn't feel that way, so I judge myself and chastise myself, and I try to get rid of it all of a sudden. Sometimes, we do things with our negative emotions, like we wanna turn them into something else. So we'll try to. I'll start feeling envy and go, okay, no, I'm not supposed to feel that. Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to channel this into a positive energy.
If I'm envious because my neighbor got a new car and I'm like, oh, I'm so jealous of the new car, I will turn my envy into fuel to save more money or something like that. And I will work harder, which will get me that brand-new car, right? I'm going to channel it. Or I start thinking, oh no, I should change how I think about this. I should say that cars aren't really important. …
And we're so quick to try to either get rid of them, talk ourselves out of them, turn them into something else. We have this real temptation to do things with them rather than just letting ourselves feel them. […]
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Thank you for listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
J.W.
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