Listen to episode 172 of the Inspirational Living podcast: Emotional Intelligence & Interpretive Dance. Edited and adapted from How to Develop Your Personality by Clare Tree Major.
Self-Development Podcast Excerpt: HAVE we forgotten how to feel? Life today is so external that it almost seems as though we have. However, our personal ideal will not be realized unless every part of our nature is developed, the emotional as well as the physical and mental. We must know how to feel, to feel keenly, but also to control our feelings.
Are you looking at a beautiful painting? Don't merely catalogue it in your mind. Sit down before it and let it sink into your soul. See the sunset as a real thing, not as exquisite painted coloring. Go up on the hill-top with the artist. Sit with them there until the vision they saw of the opening of the heavens thrills your own feeling into responsiveness.
There are some feelings that we can neither put into word nor into action, and they are sometimes the very deepest, most sacred feelings of which the soul is capable. There are unconscious depths from which our more familiar and external characteristics spring.
Did you ever stand alone on the seashore and let the song of the mighty ocean fill your soul with its transcendent melody? You look out to the horizon across the roaring, foaming billows, and you know that far, far beyond your vision still rolls and tosses this great mass of living water. And your soul is thrilled with a sense of the insignificance of the trivialities of life, and some glimpse of the destiny of humanity comes to you, so that you go home conscious of a strange uplift that helps you to see above and beyond the petty annoyance of the daily grind, that helps to keep you in that perfect poise which is the essence of individuality.
It is in moments like these, when all that is external is forgotten, when the inner self is bathed in the glory of its natural life, that we gain the perspective that is needed if we are to make of ourselves all we are capable of becoming.
Related Self-Development Podcasts:
The Inward Life
How to Be Self-Confident