This is the season of caring, sharing and extending ourselves, a truly spiritual time. As a small gift to you, I'd like to share some simple yet powerful thoughts on Reason, Emotion, Thought and Feeling.

In their wonderful book, “A General Theory of Love”, authors Lewis, Amini and Lannon, all MDs, present some enlightening theories about how it all works, backed up by intensive scientific research. As we work as a society to become more emotionally aware and responsive to one another, honoring our hearts as well as our intellects, here are some points to ponder extracted from their book.

1. People who do not intuit or respect the laws of acceleration and momentum break bones; those who do not grasp the principles of love waste their lives and break their hearts.
2. Evolution's stuttering process has fashioned a brain that is fragmented and inharmonious, and to some degree composed of players with competing interests.
3. We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only serve.' -- Albert Einstein
4. A person cannot direct his/her emotional life in the way (s)he bids his motor system to reach for a cup. (S)he cannot will himself to want the right thing, or to love the right person, or to be happy after a disappointment, or even to be happy in happy times. Emotional life can be influenced, but it cannot be commanded
5. A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a love sickness. It is never a thought to begin with. -- Robert Frost
6. In all cases, emotions are humanity's motivator and its omnipresent guide.
7. Our society underplays the importance of emotions. Having allied itself with the neocortical brain, our culture promotes analysis over intuition, logic over feeling. But even as it reaps the benefits of reason, modern North America plows emotion under. This is a costly practice that obstructs happiness and misleads people about the nature and significance of their lives.
8. Because it is part of the physical universe, love has to be lawful. Like the rest of the world, it is governed and described by principles we can discover but cannot change.
9. The neocortical brain's tendency to wax hypothetical becomes a deadly liability. The limbic brain, unable to distinguish between incoming sensory experience and neocortical imaginings, revisits emotions upon a body that was not designed to withstand such a procession.
10. Sometimes we think of ourselves as inhabiting a body that's self-regulating, but our physiological balance doesn't occur in such a closed-loop. We are "open-looped" and need someone else we're attached to complete the loop and allow us to function with stability. We do this through emotions.

The conclusion? We need other people to self-regulate; it's not prefer, or like, but NEED. Man and wife, mother and child, brother and sister, best friend and best friend, neighbour and neighbour, and those other special mammals to whom we have a special tie, our pets. We're all in this together. We need each other. Right now – and always.