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Nicole Kidman on conscience
She clearly has a strong conscience, and it's not for nothing that her gang calls her Church Lady.
As she puts it, "My mom's always saying, 'You shouldn't put so much emphasis on being good.' "
I notice her eyes filling up as she says this. "It makes me cry." she acknowledges. "Because the weight of one's conscience can be so debilitating, you know? I really want to die without having done things that I deeply regret...
"I was quite appropriate as a child. I didn't let my mother down. I could be very good. But I also wanted to experience things... "I can be led astray. I find it tempting, enticing, and I'm pretty much up fpr anything... [but] the guilt, if I do something, weighs me down... Some people can live the other way. They have some sort of latch that locks the stuff in. I don't."
>from article: Spellbound, by Ingrid Sischy,
Vanity Fair July 2005
> image from "Cold Mountain" 2003 -
photo by Phil Bray/Miramax Films~ ~ ~ ~
On the other hand, the most creative and morally advanced people are typically not models of high self-esteem. Their inner lives are often plagued by self-doubt, worries, fears, and feelings of inferiority. One reason for this chronic insecurity is that they base their self-evaluations on very high personal standards, and thus their own behavior seems inadequate and far from ideal in comparison.
But this insecurity is usually a sign of an active conscience at work.
> from article What Is Wrong With Feeling Good? by Elizabeth Mika
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"Emotions are the next frontier to be understood and conquered. To manage our emotions is not to drug them or suppress them, but to understand them so that we can intelligently direct our emotional energies and intentions...
"It's time for human beings to grow up emotionally, to mature into emotionally managed and responsible citizens. No magic pill will do it."
Doc Childre - founder of the Institute of HeartMath - which makes
the biofeedback program Freeze-Framer
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 Interestingly, negative emotions are usually more infectious than positive ones... humans usually react more stronglyto pain, fear, sadness and disgust than to joy and serenity, says John T. Cacioppo, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and coauthor.. of Emotional Contagion. One of the functions of sadness, he says, is to solicit help from others. Pain, fear, and disgust are usually linked directly to survival instinct. "When both good and bad are very strong, the bad trumps," Cacioppo says. In fact, when he recorded electrical activity in the brain, he found that negative emotions elicited a stronger reaction. Some people are also particularly vulnerable to catching emotion; others excel at emitting it. Expressive, dramatic personalities send stronger signals, while, not surprisingly, attentive, empathetic observers are more likely to pick up on someone else's emotional display. /// |
 Research also suggests that women are much better than men at reading, and thus catching, others' emotions.> from
article Emotional Contagion - by Elaine Hatfield,
> photographs : Laurence Fishburne [left], Benicio del Toro > related pages :.... |
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Emotional toxins and nourishment often are so mixed as to be indistinguishable. Even if they can be distinguished, it may be impossible for an individual to get one without the other. In order to get emotional nourishment, one may have to take in emotional toxins.
A life can so sour, and a person so accommodate to high levels of toxins, that he or she may develop aversive reactions to less polluted opportunities for nourishment. Life may not feel real without large doses of emotional toxins. Some people cannot take nourishment that is not embedded in psychic poisons.
> from book Toxic Nourishment - by Michael Eigen, PhD
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But William H. Macy is fascinating, and listening to him talk about what his job has meant to him as a human being reminds you why art matters to begin with -- because it can show us our true selves, which all struggle to be free and open.
When Macy, the son of an East Coast insurance salesman, tells how a scene in "Pleasantville" left him weeping for 12 hours after he played it, he confesses, looking at the floor: "I don't like emotions.
"I'm not an emotional -- well, I am emotional, but I don't like emotions... For some reason I'm more comfortable in imaginary circumstances." "As I've gotten older," Macy says at another point, "I marvel at this army of people, and the hubbub on a set, and then everyone gets quiet and stands still -- and it's your turn. And you have to do something dangerous or intimate or self-deprecating or brave, and nobody gets to go home til you do it. And it brings me to life."
> from article : "And yet... it's hard not to watch 'Actors' "
- By Shawn Hubler, Los Angeles Times
[about the tv series "Inside the Actors Studio"]
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Says Scientific American, "More complex tasks require more mental manipulation, and this manipulation of information - discerning similarities and inconsistencies, drawing inferences, grasping new concepts and so on - constitutes intelligence in action. "Indeed, intelligence can best be described as the ability to deal with cognitive complexity." ...
"Cognitive" is our keyword here. Yes, the world is cognitively complex.
However, it is perhaps infinitely more emotionally complex.
Emotional Intelligence consists of a wide range of capacities which enable people to excel, such as intentionality, creativity, resilience, self-awareness, impulse control, persistence, and empathy. 
..
..Susan Dunn, MA - from her newsletter -
see her ebooks on emotional intelligence resources
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Literature and art live in these two ways, as a bloodstream that connects us to the world, as a mirror for our emotions; and as a magic script that allows us both to sound our own depths and also to enter the echoing storehouse of feeling that goes by the name of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, Munch, Proust, and all the great writers and artists whose work exists to nourish us. I see the great books as a feast for the heart. For too long we have been encouraged to see culture as an affair of intellect, and reading as a solitary exercise.
But the truth is different: literature and art are pathways of feeling, and our encounter with them is social, inscribing us in a larger community; a community composed of buried selves and loved ones, as well as the fellowship of writers over time.
Literature and art provide intercourse of a unique sort. Through art we discover that we are not alone...
A Scream Goes Through The House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life -
by Arnold Weinsteinart: The Scream, 1893, by Edvard Munch [detail]
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Research suggests that moods help regulate specific tasks performed by the lateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain critical to reasoning and intelligence. "The brain is organized to process emotions along with logic," states Richard Restak, M.D., a psychiatrist and professor of neurology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Restak's book Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot provides 28 tips on strengthening mental acuity and, when necessary, turning emotion to one's advantage.
A new study, conducted at Washington University (WU) in St. Louis, shows more specifically how emotions and learning interact.
Subjects viewed pleasant, neutral or anxiety-inducing video clips, then performed cognitive tasks while their brain activity was monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging.
The results, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that emotional states such as enjoyment and anticipation augment tasks executed by the left prefrontal cortex, while negative emotions, including fear and anxiety, enhance tasks processed by the right prefontal cortex. 
..
..from article Mood Swing: How feelings help and hurt -
By Kaja Perina [Psychology Today]~ ~ ~ ~....
Boyfriend Chris Klein and Katie Holmes have been together over three years and have similar Catholic, Midwestern upbringings. "We're both guilt-stricken people," Holmes explains. "We'll be very successful in life because we have so much guilt - it's a great motivator."
[from The Last Girl Scout by Judith Newman, Allure mag June 2003]
text and photo from katieholmespictures site
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| Envy
is such a creepy little sin that few will ever confess to it, or express
it, except in reverse, as moral outrage, rising up to smite the people
you envy. ...
The envy that we midwesterners feel for people on the coasts, who seem not to be bound by the same cautions and taboos we grew up with, not so inhibited by modesty, who take open pleasure in their talents, their possessions, their good fortune in being who they are, people who don't carry the clunky moral baggage that we do. I think of a man I met once in Los Angeles, a writer who cranks out TV shows in which unattractive people snarl at each other to the accompaniment of a laugh track. He is 34 and lives atop a hill in Malibu in a big rambling sunny house with umber tile floors and rattan carpets and white gilded furniture, where you amble out into the balmy February twilight, a glass of wine in hand ... what a golden deal this flannel-brain has made for himself. The guy is a flabby writer, a creator of unrecyclable trash, and he is jetting down to Brazil and Peru and climbing the Andes and canoeing into the rain forests and having more fun than I am, especially when I sit here and envy him. |
.. .. From the bite he would catch a rare fish-transmitted disease that leaves the victim feeling lethargic and stupefied and that takes sixteen months to run its course. I would send him a note of sympathy. Charity is the antidote for envy, but one must have an occasion for charity. His brave struggle against a fish-transmitted stupor would clear up my envy completely, I'm sure. from
"The Seven Deadly Sins -- Envy" by Garrison
Keillor - posted on
audio
CD: A
Prairie Home Companion: 25th Anniversary
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| According
to Descartes' famous dualist theory, human beings were composed of physical
bodies and immaterial minds.
Spinoza disagreed. In "The Ethics," his masterwork, published after his death in 1677, he argued that body and mind are not two separate entities but one continuous substance. As for Descartes' view of the mind as a reasoning machine, Spinoza thought that was dead wrong. Reason, he insisted, is shot through with emotion. ... Lately, scientists have begun to approach consciousness in more Spinozist terms: as a complex and indivisible mind-brain-body system. And now Dr. Antonio Damasio, the head of neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center in Iowa City and leading anti-Cartesian crusader, says that Spinoza was right in other ways as well. |
.. .. Feeling,
it turns out, is not the enemy of reason, but, as Spinoza saw it, an indispensable
accomplice. "Science is proving Spinoza more current," Dr. Damasio said...
"He intuited the basic mechanism of the emotions."
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| When
we don't understand the purpose of feelings or know how to interpret them,
we can get anxious, angry and overreact.
Feelings can complicate our life and lead us to heartache and heartbreak. Not that this is always bad. We often learn from heartache, but just as often we end up trapped for years in judgment, blame and resentment. Unmanaged feelings and unresolved anguish lead to a lot of misunderstanding and hate. ... The task is to learn how to intelligently resolve our emotions for our own and others' benefit, to enrich our experience of life. ... Emotional stress is not going to go away. We need to raise our emotional set point - our threshold of emotional overreaction - and we can, once we understand how. from Chapter One excerpt - posted on HeartMath page from book Overcoming Emotional Chaos - by Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman, PhD [right] |
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Self-actualizing people are aware of their own feelings, do not try to repress them, often act upon them, and even when they do not act upon them are able to admit them to awareness. They acknowledge their negative feelings (e.g., anxiety and rage) but do not necessarily act out and often make efforts to change them when they are inappropriate and self-defeating.
Albert Ellis - from his article "Achieving Self-Actualization" - posted on Albert Ellis Institute site -
from his book How to control your anxiety before it controls you
another book: A Guide to Rational Living
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Also, some actors who are quite emotional give a very restrained performance, and can incredibly transmit on an emotional level. Judi Dench [right] has given some very restrained performances that knock us all out as an audience. Paul Newman has been described as most compelling when appearing to do nothing at all.
from interview: Lynne Azpeitia - Supporting creative achievement~ ~ ~ ~
| Every
dark emotion has a value and purpose. There are no negative emotions; there
are only negative attitudes towards emotions we don't like and can't tolerate,
and the negative consequences of denying them. The emotions we call "negative"
are energies that get our attention, ask for expression, transmit information
and impel action.
Grief tells us that we are all interconnected in the web of life, and that what connects us also breaks our hearts. Fear alerts us to protect and sustain life. Despair asks us to grieve our losses, to examine and transform the meaning of our lives, to repair our broken souls. Each of these emotions is purposeful and useful - if we know how to listen to them. from article The Wisdom in the Dark Emotions by Miriam Greenspan. Shambhala Sun, Jan. 2003. shambhalasun.com
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| Science is
unlocking the secrets of the ideal and dysfunctional responses to fear
that make for the incredible variations in human behavior. We are now learning
how the brain builds into its "Software" an "internal parent" that will
either soothe us or paralyze us when we are afraid, depending on the healthy
or unhealthy responses to our emotions that we experienced in childhood.
The essential element of character is this: our inner emotional voice reacts to our fears or opportunities and either calms and inspires or responds with a specific painful voice, giving rise to worry, anger, or disappointment. In the dramatic scenes of films such as Ordinary People, Suspicion, Rainman, or in successful novels and short stories, it is evident that the writers have unlocked the mysteries of these brain "characters" long before the scientists. from article: Writing: An Art or Science? by Robert Maurer, PhD - from his site: scienceofexcellence |
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*related article:....On Fear by Douglas Eby~ ~ ~ ~
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