It's Good to Know What You are Feeling

Today I listened to a Podcast conversation between scholars Brene Brown and Marc Brackett. The topic - The Permission to Feel. This conversation and Brackett's book are essential reading/listening for those in education.
The quick version can be remembered by the acronym RULER:
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Recognizing emotion that comes to us,
​Understanding the emotion,
Labeling the emotion,
Expressing the emotion, and
Regulating the emotion. 
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These ideas hit home for me because I thought I was feeling numb to the current COVID-19 crisis. The idea of feeling numb was paralyzing my response to the world. Now I realize that I am fully aware of how I am feeling and that I am self-regulating those emotions. If we want to raise children to be effective compassionate leaders, then we need to teach them to recognize and honor the feelings they experience in life. Visual art is the perfect vehicle for helping people to express their emotions as part of the larger process of understanding themselves. 

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