A few thoughts:
Re what you said about bad moods as physical contractions rather than external environment changes, Danny, that makes total sense to me - makes me think of how object relations might explain the same phenonmenon, as internal readjustments/expansion of the bad objects and increased difficulty in making contact with the good objects, again in preference to any external changes. Which also fits with the way one - or at least I - experience life, and why moods can be baffling if you approach solely from an external perspective.
Yoga classes often feel humiliating, as they're frequently given by hectoring narcissists dedicated to alternately buffeting and destroying egos - feels like a re-run of sports at school. But I had a few individual yoga lessons with a good teacher once, and it totally transformed the way I feel about it. It was approached in a more holistic way.
Sweeping ideas and broad intellectual/emotional vistas are definitely where it's at. The world needs more visionaries who can create links between ideas and between whole disciplines, not a surfeit of blinkered thinkers happy to be stuck in silos. eg In my contact with academia, it always alarmed me how academics very skilled in one area could have such a sub-par (often laughable) understanding of other disciplines - politics experts without any sense of personal psychology, for example, which inevitably made it impossible for them to really understand politics.
Which makes me think of:
"in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” Sounds good.