Aimed to help foster a deepening of connection with our inner landscape, and to develop greater emotional intelligence, intimacy with our human experience, and capacity for self-love and healing. Inspired by The Atlas of Emotions and borrowing heavily from The Junto Institute’s emotion wheel.

When we name our inner experience, we begin to create space for it. In this space, we may discover greater freedom in how we relate to our experience. We discover an innate capacity to meet our human experience with compassion and acceptance. We celebrate the spectrum of all that it is to be human: the pain, the fear, the joy, the pride.

Inspired by Eve and Paul Ekman’s foundational Cultivating Emotional Balance training, this tool guides the user in understanding, naming, and describing their affective landscape with greater detail. Resembling a flower, furling and unfurling with user interaction, each petal represents a feeling-word and each layer leads to greater specificity of emotion. By layering these emotions and describing one’s experience, the user is supported in weaving a narrative of their internal landscape. Longitudinal reports reveal personal patterns and trends throughout the days, weeks, and months.

I hope to extend this work in the future by supporting vocabulary personalization, accommodating the spectrum of what self-expression looks like. I am also interested in exploring how this project could be used to facilitate forms of vulnerable social media, fostering safe spaces of genuine openness and support. My dream is that tools like this become embedded into SEL pedagogy from a young age, so that we are raised with a more heartfelt attunement to ourselves and to those around us.

Stack used: React, Next.js, D3.js, ChakraUI, and Mobx. Hosted on Vercel.