"From the warm perch of my friend's bedroom, I settled into a stillness-the rare kind that comes packaged in six-degree temps and nowhere to be. No calls. No agenda. Just the snow and me. And in that stillness, I caught something. I was only watching. All that beauty swirling around me-and I'd shown up with one sense. Eyes open, everything else idle. Immersed in observing the experience instead of having it."
"Shallowing is the gradual, often unconscious way we narrow our emotional range. Through years of coping, adapting, and performing, we learn to compress our felt experience into a thin, manageable band. We mute the lows to survive. And without realizing it, we mute the highs right along with them. If emotions were sounds, think of what we've practiced: containing the uncomfortable ones. Something painful happens-a loss, a rejection, a season of relentless pressure-and we instinctively turn down the volume."
A moment of stillness revealed a common tendency to observe beauty without fully inhabiting it, relying on sight while other senses and presence remain idle. Over years of coping and performing, people compress their felt experience into a narrow, manageable band, muting painful emotions to survive and unintentionally muting joyful ones as well. Emotional numbing cannot be selectively applied; turning down sadness also reduces wonder and delight. What begins as protective adaptation can become a default mode that limits depth of feeling and leaves individuals only partially present despite external success.
Read at Psychology Today
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