Dear Friends

Suppose you wake up in a fairly decent mood. To prolong the good feeling you might try to think pleasant thoughts, meditate, recite affirmations, or practice relaxation and guided imagery techniques. For the time being, you will have "managed" anxiety, stress, or anger.

But no matter what you do to fortify yourself, within just a few minutes of your typical day, it's all gone. Any pleasant state of mind you've achieved gives way almost immediately to whatever negative emotions and stressors occur around you, like the resentful look on your spouse's face or a scowl of an aggressive driver or the frown of a co-worker.

To the extent that you successfully shut out the negativity and stress around you, you become less sensitive to the world you live in, more self-obsessed, and more in need of meditation, affirmations, and anxiety-stress-anger-management to deal with the effects of shutting out reality; you become like a camera taking pictures in a mirror.

With either reaction - absorbing or shutting out - your emotional well being is controlled by all the people you meet. In obvious and in very subtle ways, all the people you meet make you into something you are not.

While emotional contagion is present in all social animals, the trouble began for humans when we grew into a sense of self and, worse, an ego, and began to interpret our emotions as having some meaning about the self and the ego rather than the tribe and the world around us. We began to misinterpret the subtle emotional transmissions of daily life by incorporating them into the movies about the self we play in our heads, to the point where we are no longer aware of them existing outside our heads. Thus we go through the day clueless about how greatly our emotions are controlled by the people we meet.

Sincerely,

Steven Stosny, Ph.D.

email: stosny@compassionpower.com

web: http://compassionpower.com