Feeling Awe Affects our Health and Happiness

Have You Ever Experienced Awe and Deep Wonder?
It Could Be the Key to Your Health and Happiness!

If you have ever stood on the shores of an island or a continent and watched the sun silently, and slowly sink beneath the horizon, you were likely quiet. Even silent.

Another day was done but you were there to see the clouds turn from pink to golden and finally to grey and then black. It seems to happen ever so slowly and yet modern people are struck with awe, so filled with awe—reverence–are we that the scene, simple and ancient as it is, fills us with wonder as the majesty of the disappearing sun grips us with something unfamiliar, wonder, the presence of the sacred.

It is when we stop and really watch the setting sun that we find ourselves changed in some mysterious way.

In a feeling way we are inspired and experience hope, wonder, gratitude and a host of other impressions including awe.

What is awe but the feeling of being at one with a vast, intelligent, planned, and honored occurrence of a sunset or sunrise that can change the way we think and look at our small personal lives.

What do we see as the sun silently steals itself closer and closer to the horizon? What do we feel?

The world goes so fast that we find ourselves hustling every moment just trying to keep up. Sadly for ourselves we rarely take the time to stop altogether to smell a flower or take a little longer and watch the full glory of a sunset.

Recently research psychologists have been taking a look at awe and what it does for us. Awe comes as a chill you get when you view the Grand Canyon, the Milky Way, Angkor Wat or a colorful sunset. Even the simplest movement of a newborn baby curling his fingers around a parent’s finger brings up that special feeling.

Awe is a fairly easily reached feeling.

In previous decades, psychological study centered on what was called the “big six” emotions: happiness, sadness, disgust, anger, fear and surprise. In contrast, awe is considered an upscale store jewel, almost a luxury thing. You’ll be amazed by what researchers are finding about awe: that it enables us to act cooperatively and safeguards our survival. It creates a shift from thinking of me to we because we recognize that we are part of something vast.

Awe enables us to see things with new eyes.

In fact, Albert Einstein understood awe as “the source of all true art and science.” It makes us easier to live with and it changes our bodies indicating that awe has a possible part to play in our health and healing.

That special feeling enables the creation of a bond with another person. It encourages working with others to create something entirely new.