I heard it said a couple weeks ago on a podcast I was listening to, “Happiness is not a point, it’s a range.” I began to churn that thought around in my head. So often, I fixate on a particularly intense emotion that I might be aware of feeling. (I’m a 4 on the Enneagram; if you know us heart-led types, you know emotional fixation can be a thing!). Some of my inner work has been to check in with myself often around my emotional experience. In the phrase above, he uses happiness, but one could exchange happiness for any emotion, even what we consider volatile emotions. I have learned that my emotions are not me and I am not my emotions. I have also learned that feelings are an intregal part of the human experience. They are here to inform, teach, express, warn and to help us heal.
For me, to view any emotion I might be feeling as a range rather than a fixed point, gives me remarkable freedom to host it with generosity and kindness. It’s very much like somatic intelligence. If we can care for our emotional health in the same way we care for our physical health, we might see its level of importance grow. To illustrate, I recently went in for my yearly physical, where they did the typical bloodwork and checked for all the regular things, such as lipids, sugar, cholesterol…. etc. When the results came back, all the categories had a range. There was a green range, a yellow range and a red range. Science tells us that the green range means that the body is functioning as it is meant to. Yellow means one might need to tweak out a few things, such as diet and exercise to return to the green range. One of my cholesterol readings had hopped into the yellow zone. I have become hyper aware of what I’m putting in my body since that result. I am slowly working toward moving back into the green range. This scale is incredibly helpful and has given me concrete action I can take to assume the range that I desire.
These two ideas converged in my life, and I began to realize that curating my emotions could look a lot like curating the care of my body. If I find myself fixated on anger, for instance, perhaps I can locate it in my body, give it space to tell me what it needs to communicate, let it run its course through my body and then the anger, that might be in the yellow zone can move back into green, into safety. What if a feeling such as happiness or gratitude begins to take up more space? I notice when I curate certain emotions that may be more difficult to manage than others, such as loneliness or frustration, confusion or anger, when I have found that they settle into the green range, other emotions that are more helpful and healing, have more space to spread out in my body, making my emotional range more symbiotic with my mental and somatic well-being. And, as we know, these three intelligence centers work together for our wholeness.
Whenever there’s pressure to get to a certain point, whether it’s physical health, mental health or emotional health, think about reframing that point into a range. It’s hard to hit a fixed point all the time. We don’t hit the bullseye every day. But, we can keep in a healthy range for today. Part of that is the check-in - with yourself. The practice of being present with yourself in real time is a gift to the world. This space of check-in is what Viktor Frankl characterizes when he says, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”