thought exercise on Feelings

Too often we are given a choice—emotions or faith and belief. Yet as Dan Allender and Tremper Longman observe,  Emotion links our internal and external worlds. To be aware of what we feel can open ...

“Empathy” literally means “in-feeling”—it is to project myself into another person’s feelings so that I begin to understand what it is like to have his experiences. If I want to gain empathy for a nei...

In navigation, the term reckoning, as in dead reckoning, is the process of calculating where you are. To do that, you have to know where you’ve been and what factors influenced how you got to where yo...

What causes anxiety? I offer this list so you can engage in an exercise… genetic predispositions parenting (overprotective, overcontrollers, inconsistent responders) early childhood experiences tha...

The ancient Greek word for actor was hypocritēs (ὑποκρῐτής), which, at first, only implied someone who explained or interpreted something. But by New Testament times, it was more negative. It suggest...

One day we were out running errands. The radio in my car was playing in the background, and between songs there was an advertisement for an online dating service. The spokesman-doctor-expert guy was d...

So, how are you feeling?  It’s not a trick question. But it’s more complicated than it sounds. We’re always feeling something, usually more than one thing at a time. Our emotions are a continuous ...

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition was one of my favorite shows for a while, mainly because I loved to see the before and after shots. The water damage in the bathroom, the rotting ceiling beams, and the ...

Sometimes we have to “step over” our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there...

You never really know a person until you know how that person perceives himself. I’m sure you have had experi­ences like I’ve had when you were sharing with another person, and that sharing became dee...

In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home , Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel focuses on the language associate...

A therapist once told me that the most common complaint he heard from his patients was the feeling that they didn’t belong. The feeling of being an imposter, or of being outside things, of not fitting...

In 1990, Peter Salovey and John Mayer published a landmark paper, “Emotional Intelligence,” in a little-known journal (after it was rejected by multiple top-tier publications). That article has since ...

Depression takes so many forms. Here’s how it looked for me today: All day I felt like a failure. An unending loop played in my head telling me that I have failed everyone in my life who loves me. My ...

In seminary I had read about the phenomenon of transference, whereby human beings sometimes transfer the feelings they have for one pivotal person in their lives to another pivotal person in their liv...

In I’d Like You More If You Were More Like Me , John Ortberg uses an interesting analogy for an aspect of our relationships. In 2015, Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner announced the Starshot Initiati...

Best-Selling leadership author Stephen Covey tells the following story about an incident he experienced in the New York subway system, an experience that would radically alter his perception of what i...

No writer has had a greater impact on my understanding of cultural identity than Dr. Beverly Tatum. …When introducing cultural identity (or racial identity, a term she uses synonymously), Tatum tells...

Every time you feel hurt, offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: “These feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself. The truth, even though I cannot...

In a 2010 study called “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind” (gulp), Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert developed an iPhone app to survey the thoughts, feelings, and action...

The Clinical psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi describes how our minds, without stimuli, tends to quickly turn towards negative thoughts, our dissatisfaction. Contrary to what we tend to assume, ...

In love. What does that even mean? “Love” is a junk drawer we dump all sorts of ideas into, just because we don’t have anywhere else to put them. I “love” God, and I “love” fish tacos. See the probl...

I have a nagging sense that when we read the word blessed , we either feel indifferent or suspicious. Both of these responses are likely the result of the way the term is (over)used in our day-to...

The marriage of Queen Victoria and Albert (otherwise known as Francis Albert Augustus Charles Emmanuel — quite a mouthful!) was one for the ages. Their love and devotion to each other was remarkable, ...

Social scientists define procrastination as “delaying a task for a maladaptively long time,” and it bedevils almost all of us. One study found that more than 70 percent of university students procrast...

The image of a lamb doesn’t evoke feelings of confidence or strength. Sports fans will never hear an announcer say, “Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together to welcome the mighty Fighting Lambs!...

The man who prosecuted the infamous Manson family for their murders later wrote a book titled Helter Skelter. This phrase was taken from a song performed by a well-known rock music group. Manson...

Good liturgy, whether formal or informal, ought never to be simply a corporate emoting session, however “Christian,” but a fresh and awed attempt to inhabit the great unceasing liturgy that is going o...

In love . What does that even mean?  “Love” is a junk drawer we dump all sorts of ideas into, just because we don’t have anywhere else to put them.  I “love” God, and I “love” fish tacos. See ...

Christian civility does not commit us to a relativistic perspective. Being civil doesn’t mean that we cannot criticize what goes on around us.  …Civility is a different matter, though. I can treat ...