Navarasas of The Human Heart

Emotions, and the way you deal with them can affect your health. This guide will help you understand the impact of nine primary emotions in maintaining health. The positive emotions create a positive field which fills your blood with the chemicals of happiness and wellbeing. They are conducive to the building or rebuilding of the healthy heart.  The negative emotions create a negative field which fills your blood with the chemicals of unrest and unhappiness.

Navarasas are a two-thousand-year-old Indian concept of emotions which see the mind as a space filled with positive and negative emotions. These emotions are: love, laughter, compassion, chivalry, anger, fear, abhorrence and wonder. Shantha or peace is the result of handling all these emotions correctly.

Obviously, the positive emotions or states like love, humour, compassion, chivalry and wonder put the mind in a happy and enthusiastic state, thereby fostering health. On the other hand, the negative rasas like anger, fear and abhorrence produce a state of mind which creates, as described in Daniel Goleman’s book, an ‘emotional hijack’.