What is Emotional Health?
Emotional health and wellness is about being able to love and be loved. It's about having a sense of self that is strong and vibrant and flexible, and at the same time allowing others to be strong, vibrant, and flexible. It's about feeling safe in the world and choosing to help make the world a safer, more loving place.
Emotional Health is clearly expressed in the following principles and skills, developed by Reverend Gerald Jud, who created Shalom Retreats over 35 years ago. As written on the wall of Shalom Mountain in the Catskills, New York they say
Principles of Loving
More than anything else, we want to love and be loved.
Love is a gift.
Love is not time bound.
Love is good will in action.
Love is a response to need.
Skills of Loving
Seeing:
I do not look over or through you, I see you in your uniqueness.
Hearing:
I listen to what you are saying.
Honoring of Feelings and Ideas:
I recognize your right to think and feel as you do.
Having Good Will:
I will you good and not evil. I care about you.
Responding to Need:
If you let me know what your needs are, within the limits of my value system,
I will not run away. I will be there for you.
Dealing With Our Past Pain
We believe that it is in working through uncomfortable feelings that we grow. We've learned to avoid, suppress, deny, minimize and rise above our feelings all of which delay our awakening and keeps us from being present with ourselves and each other.
Often the last thing we want to do is feel our uncomfortable feelings...to experience our grief, and anger and fear. It's just too hard, too traumatic. Yet the gifts of growth that come from working through our feelings are essential to our growth, to expressing our emotional health and full aliveness.
Within our pain, within our grief, our fear, our anger, etc., are amazing gifts waiting for us to discover. These are the gifts of aliveness, passion, creativity, wisdom and joy.
These gifts within our pain are the keys to emotional health.
Working pain through is the direct path to Love. Angels may love us, but as we work our past through we learn to embody love, which is a uniquely humans path of learning.
Fortunately, our retreats make the process of working through past pain into emotional health safe and much easier than most of us imagine.
As you learn to work through stuck and denied emotions you discover amazing gifts. You learn to live in your body and be in the world in a new, powerful and joyful way.
You have everything you need within yourself to heal and awaken and serve life joyously.
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Go From Emotional Health To Shalom Retreat or Grief and Loss Retreat
Go To Jon Terrell's biography
For more on the Skills of Loving go to Love Skills