I Am the Emperor

This is a book about feelings. As Sandy Weymouth writes, “It can be helpful to look at them, analyze them, think and talk about them, express them in some way. But if you really want to do something about them, feel them. As deeply and completely as possible.” This may sound easy but we rarely do it, because we’re conditioned to stop feeling anything that gives us the slightest discomfort: we relieve feelings by suppressing them. But human culture, Weymouth explains, has now come to a turning point. Over centuries, much of the technology we’ve developed has protected us and made our lives safer—-and the safer we are, the more we can open up to the feelings we have long tried to stifle. This book persuades us to surrender up to the deepest parts of us, to feel the deepest parts of us. “Do and get what you want and need most, and experience the feelings that come up along the way. Do that and you’ll do the world more good than you’re doing it now. That’s the argument of I Am The Emperor.”