The Wisdom of the Rosary Approach

Pedagogy 3 Minutes

You only have one emotion to regret for the rest of the day, and it’s painful.

William James (1913) coined the theory of emotions and proposed that there are only four emotions among human beings based on bodily engagements. And these are love, rage, fear, and grief. In 1900 century, psychologists paid little attention to the emotional side of human beings, and hence, the emotions were limited to these four bodily ones. As we progressed in the epoch of time, psychologist Paul Ekman (1973) studied emotions in relation to their expression to the facial expression. His research revealed that human beings are capable of over 10,000 emotional expressions, but only 3,000 are relevant, and it cut down to six basic emotions. That is, anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise

Moving on, Richard Lazarus (1982) classified emotions differently by connecting emotions with thoughts (factors, like internal or external). His research works came out with the result suggesting that human emotions can be categorized into 15 types of emotions. The subject of listing down emotions is still under debate, and we are getting new findings as we move forward with the latest research in the field of psychology.

As a psychology student, I admire the research made by my fellow researcher and their fantastic contribution to the field of study. However, these researches were principally based on the theory of reductionism. In a reductionist approach, a psychologist explains the subject by breaking it down into smaller units and then studying them individually and creating a linkage among individualized items.

For a moment, let’s shift away from the world of academic papers and flip the pages of ancient literature. The simplest form to explain human emotions comes in the form of rosary. A rosary is a tactile aid that tracks the count of meditation, devotion, or prayers. If you have ever noticed a rosary and counted its beads, you might be surprised that it varies in count from region to region and religion to religion. Out of all the rosaries available in the market, what makes the Buddhist rosary different from the rest is the metaphorical count of feelings that one can experience. It has a total of 108 beads, and each bead counts for one feeling that we possibly experience in a day.

In a researcher’s linguistics, the conceptual model to estimate human feelings based on the concept of Buddhist rosary is quite simple. It has an outcome (or dependent variable) that is feelings, which is controlled by six variables. The formula says:

108 (feelings) = 6 (senses) x 3 (experience) x 3 (moments) X 2 (factors)

Description of controlled (or independent) variables are:

  • Six senses, namely taste, smell, vision, hearing, touch, or consciousness (or proprioception).
  • Three experiences which are painful, neutral, or pleasant
  • Three moments mean past, present, or future.
  • Two factors are external (exogenous) and internal (endogenous).

And this piece of wisdom came from ancient literature without conducting any reductionism.

So whenever you feel a change in your feelings, go through an introspection and check the authenticity of the control variables that have changed your feelings. You can control your feelings and emotions if you know how they are triggered by looking at the above formula. You can even train your mind to keep certain control variables away from your routine. One such variable to keep away is pain. That’s the only experience that you should control to manage the 36 possible variants of emotions as a result of pain.

I don’t have a rosary, but I frequently use journal stickers, which come with a Moleskin diary. When I looked back into my kiss-cut stickers pack for the last year, I noticed that I didn’t use any painful or sad journal stickers – and left all those experiences outside my diary. One may say that my diary with a journal sticker is a rosary for me to control my feelings.

Author: Asif Durrani

Dated: 02 Jan 2024

https://www.linkedin.com/in/asifdurrani

Also published at Medium

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