The Seven Basic Feelings HOPE

The seven basic feelings are;

Mad

Sad

Glad

Hurt

Afraid

Shame

Hope

Whenever I state these, people always ask me, well, what about love?  I answer that love is the core of everything.  It is called many things, but feeling connected to others and ourselves is our basic humanness.  The other seven are ancillary and help us negotiate the basic problems of love. 

Love is the most basic need of all.  To feel welcomed, valued, honored and accepted (to name a few) is what every one of us hopes to achieve.

Each feeling has its accompanying need and consequence if not met.

So I am going to take each feeling and expand on it a bit in hopes that people can begin to articulate what they are feeling a little better.  That helps a lot in relationships

It always amuses me that if you ask a man what he feels, he will tell you what he thinks and obversely, if you ask a woman what she thinks, she will likely tell you what she feels.  The integrating of thinking and feelings creates the outcomes we all desire.  Putting who you are back on what you do.

The seventh and last feeling to cover here is HOPE.  Hope is like an internal sunrise, overcoming the shadows and darkness. Hope gets us through the roughest times.  Hope needs a vision.  If that need is met it becomes the central driver and keeps a person focused and oriented to achieve the vision.  If the dream is killed off the person tends to become unfocused, scattered and fragmented.  Dream killers are difficult to spot and uncover.

As a kid my hope was that I would survive and the vision was to build a more loving, happy and accepting life for myself.  As I grew up my vision of that life morphed and evolved, most of the time I wasn’t even consciously aware I was doing that, but my dream gently guided my choices. 

Hope kinda brings everything together for most humans and all the other feelings are in service of realizing our dreams.   Every time I strayed from my vision or got discouraged I felt a sorta tap on the shoulder pointing me back in the correct direction, and invariably when I was discourage someone would show up and reignite the hope.   

These days my hope is that I can continue to heal and the world with me.