Sharing New Possibilities
Gameful explorations of emotions and life
Yesterday, I received a message from the local post office that a package was in our mailbox. I knew what it was, as I was expecting it. And still, I had butterflies in my stomach when I went to pick it up. They come every time I receive an author copy of my book, even after tens of those occurrences.
And every time, I think, “It is different this time,” including now. It feels different. Maybe because the book I wrote and published has a special meaning for me this time. I must say all of my books had. But this one feels even more special. It might be one of the most important I have ever written.
Here is why. This book is about navigating emotions in a unique and, until now, unknown way — by exploring them as if they were games. We all struggle with our emotions, sometimes more, sometimes less. Researching and writing this book was an emotional and rewarding process.
An excerpt from Navigate Your Emotions by Exploring Them Like Games: How to Feel with Curiosity Rather Than Suffering below addresses various reactions and explains its creation.
I don’t know when I first thought of exploring emotions like games. It must have been more than two years before completing the first draft of this book in the summer of 2024. I was writing another book on approaching life gamefully when the idea came and grew stronger every day.
When I share the possibility of approaching life gamefully, which I used to and sometimes still call turning life into fun games, I am met with smiles or nods of recognition and often also curiosity.
But this kind of immediate recognition was missing when I started sharing that I was writing a book about exploring and seeing emotions like games. Instead, my conversation partners used to have a momentary blank and confused look, followed by a frown.
People who didn’t know me well nodded and changed the subject. But those closer to me often asked the following question about exploring emotions like games: “Why would you want to do that?”
These reactions and the question helped me become more aware of what I intended with this book and its message. They helped me forge and polish its mission and ultimately shape this book.
The light of recognition came into my conversation partners’ eyes when I drew and shared parallels with games.
That is what this book is about, and here is one of the reasons for its existence.
We don’t enjoy playing all the games that can be found. We choose not to play some games when we learn more about them, their rules, what they are about, and how they are built.
The same is true with emotions and feelings. We can’t help experiencing them when they happen, but we can choose what we do next. Do we do something that enhances the feeling we experience due to any specific emotion, or do we turn our attention to something else that might generate other emotions and feelings?
The choice is up to us.
Thank you!
I hope you enjoyed this excerpt from Navigate Your Emotions by Exploring Them Like Games: How to Feel with Curiosity Rather Than Suffering. To find out more about the book, check out the description below.
In this book, Victoria Ichizli-Bartels offers simple tools to explore your emotions, resulting feelings, and connected experiences as if they were games.
Ichizli-Bartels argues that you may not be able to control your emotions, but you can navigate them; often without having to act through them, but allowing yourself to feel with curiosity and without suffering, pressure, or guilt. All you have to do is know your tools and use them well during your navigation adventure.
Navigate Your Emotions by Exploring Them Like Games is a surprising, revolutionary, and never-before-undertaken approach to exploring emotions, feelings, and experiences by dissecting them into the main and well-known game components: goals, rules, feedback systems, and voluntary participation.
The three parts of the book present a detailed introduction to the approach, many examples of gameful explorations of emotions, feelings, and related concepts considered in pairs, and true stories from the author’s life illustrating sometimes surprising but always illuminating experiences of emotions.
The concluding two chapters will introduce you to the start of an infinite list of emotions, feelings, and related concepts and give you some ideas and a template for your gameful explorations of emotions.
Letting yourself feel an emotion does not need to be stressful or scary. Take the gameful challenge this book offers. Learn how to navigate your emotions by exploring them like games, the tools you will need for that, and what you can do to control these tools and become the best designer and player of the fantastic game collection that is your life.
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