Liberating Spaces

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For the last months I have written quite a bit about emotions and reason. In what I called the emotional revolution, I see a process of transformation through which we realize that reason is not the only legitimate source of knowledge and meaning in our lives. We are starting, as individuals and as communities, to get into contact with our emotions in ways we can share and give them common meaning by new and rediscovered means – images, music, movies, farming, cooking, exercise, travelling, comedy, Internet and social networks, etc. – at a global level. Emotions are becoming essential to understand our environment, our peers and ourselves. We are as much emotional as rational beings. To give full meaning to our reality, reason and emotion need to be accomplices.

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Paulo Coelho in his novel The Alchemist wrote

“Listen to your heart. It knows all things, because it came from the Soul of the World, and it will one day return there. Wherever your heart is, that is where you’ll find your treasure. Your heart is alive. Keep listening to what it has to say.”

It is a simple, but powerful statement. Yet it is much more difficult to follow than it seems. Listening to your heart is not an easy thing. For very often we think we are doing it, but we are actually listening to the layers of values, ideas and practices that we have learned in the past. They look like our feelings, our intuition, but they are not. Other times we are captured by our fear, which muffles what the heart has to say. Listening to your heart is to go beyond the learned values and the fear, and feel what your intuition is telling you. The communication with it doesn’t come through the language, it is not logical, but through your emotions.

Sometimes in life we are presented with rare opportunities that can make our life a special experience. These are life treasures. Yet, very often we don’t see them as such, and we lose them. We miss these opportunities because we haven’t listened to our heart, to what our deep emotions, to what our intuition is telling us. Either because we cynically rationalise them, we convince ourselves that treasures, these special encounters that can make our life different, do not exist, that they are never what they seem. Or because we are afraid, fear tells us that these treasures hide something bad in then, that sooner or later they will bring us pain.

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Thanks to my very good friends Christine (@mccarthymadsen) and Matthew, I could meet today Alice Fung (@00alice) and Indy Johar (@indy_johar) from 00:/. Very interesting people. I wanted to meet them because in Factoria Ciudadana we have already started to work on the project of opening a The Hub in Barcelona. Already other social entrepreneurs in Barcelona have already been working on the same project for a few months, and we are starting to collaborate to make it real. Alice and Indy have been designing The Hub conceptual space from the beginning. I’ve already expressed my view about The Hub in a recent post. But the interest of talking with them goes beyond it. Their ideas are in tune with how I see the world and its future.

Last Sunday, some people organized in The Hub-King’s Cross a TEDX Volcano (second video below, skip the first 15 minutes, it is just people talking), an original way of bringing people trapped in London to share ideas about a diversity of issues, TED-style. (more…)

”The division between reason and passion, or cognition and emotion (an opposition that goes all the way back to Aristotle), is, from a neurological point of view, a fallacy.’ – Jonathan Bate

Baruch Spinoza in his masterwork “Ethics” argued that body and mind are not two separate entities but a continuous substance. In accordance with his belief that God is an infinite substance more equated with Nature, the continuity of reality applies to emotion and reason. Until now, we have lived in a world dominated by Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am”, but recent scientific studies prove this abstraction of the rational mind from the body and our feelings as being a wrong description of what we actually are.

The world we have built on the basis of rationality and the scientific method as the prime way of make ourselves happy, and our societies prosperous is crumbling. We are realising that our nature and reality is a continuity in which emotions are not the enemy of reason, but the necessary accomplice. This change is the “emotional revolution“.

I just came back from a fantastic dinner with Daniel Cremin (@danielcremin) and Francine (from Creative Open Workshops). As it is being usual lately, I’ve started with my personal problems. I’ve spent a big deal of time telling them about the situation I am right now, concerning my emotions for someone I met recently about whom I care very much. They gave me amazing advise.

Then, when Daniel went to put money into the parking machine, Francine told me about her work as art therapist for mentally-ill children. She said that it was a great way for them to feel and share emotions. Art is an amazing way of experiencing feelings together with others. Why are we keeping art therapy in the margins? Why aren’t doing art therapy in the schools for everybody, for all ages? This is one of the main points of what I call emotional revolution. We need to feel more. We need to start investing in activities that teach our kids and us how to feel and share these feeling with others. Experiences by which we learn to interpret what we feel, and give us the opportunity to share it with others. We cannot invest all our resources in utilitarian and rational activities, which in great part are forgotten or simply ignored in our lives. Art therapy, as cooking, or dancing, or farming are ways for us to make a new world where emotions become the core of our actions, in complement with our reason. This is what the emotional revolution is all about.