(Most of the conflicts in our relationship are due to lack of emotional balance and poise. This article examines how to achieve this balance, which comes from a free and equal heart.)
- Emotional balance means what Sri Aurobindo describes as a “free and equal heart,” which means a heart poised in freedom, equanimity, peace and benevolence.
- Free heart means an emotional being which is free from
- Excessive or overwhelming attachment to people or things.
- Craving for more and more of pleasure, possession, power or experiences
- Worry and anxiety over the past or the future.
- Compulsive slavery to likes and dislikes and other emotional preferences
- Negative feelings like anger, jealousy.
- Equal heart means an emotional being which remain equal and undisturbed against the assault of swinging, unequal and varying moods, emotions or inner reaction like pain and pleasure, grief and happiness, anger and affection and also under the shock of external events like success and failure, praise and blame.
- When the heart is free and equal it also bring a settled peace to the emotional being. And a free, equal and peaceful heart is receptive to a more creative, selfless and wider feelings which come from the deeper sources of our being or in other words it is capable of a deeper, wider and purer love than the surface emotional being.
- A free, equal and peaceful heart is the foundation of personal happiness as well as professional effectiveness.
- The balanced heart is a happy heart and when it expresses itself in the outer life it leads to:
- Kindly and harmonious interpersonal relationship
- Greater emotional intelligence and the ability to know by feeling, which means the ability to know by sympathetic and feeling identity.
- Greater emotional, mental and moral wellbeing
- A more authentic and effective ethical sensitivity and commitment to higher values
- Free and peaceful heart has its positive impact on the intelligence, because a troubled, unequal and turbulent emotions can distort and cloud the working of the intelligence. When the emotional being is pure and peaceful, it brings greater clarity to intelligence.
- How to develop emotional balance
- First step is to become fully conscious of the present condition of our emotional being, how unequal, bound, twisted and dark it is and step back from it.
- Observe carefully with the attitude of scientific detachment, the movements of our emotional being.
- Practice of Inner Detachment and Equanimity, which means to inwardly detach or disidentify from all the rush and swing of emotional reactions and try to remain calm and equal.
- Know with an inner psychological concreteness what are the thoughts and emotions which lead to turmoil, disturbance or darkening of the emotions and refuse sanction to them or reject them by will.
- Conversely cultivate positive thought and emotions which bring peace, clarity, goodwill and benevolence to the emotional being.
For further reading and a detailed discussion on this subject, please see the following article in this blog: Knowing by Feeling (http://integralmusings.wordpress.com/2014/07/29/knowing-by-feeling-m-s-srinivasan/)
