Emotions

by: Chuck Spezzano

Did You Know? This world is a classroom, and your lessons are learned through the medium of emotion. You have a form of intelligence that is seldom recognized or measured by our society, yet it is an important aspect of your development and growth, and it is central to your spiritual evolution. This form of intelligence is emotional intelligence.

You are here in this world to experience an emotional life, and to transform your emotional reactions into the wisdom, maturity and self-love that will advance you along your evolutionary path. India s ancient Vedic scriptures say that even Heavenly beings must come to Earth and take on human form in order to evolve. Certainly, to be human is to experience emotion.

Your emotions are vibratory, and when they are not impeded they flow naturally through your awareness and are released. They provide you with crucial feedback about the choices you are making. If you react to a situation with judgment or attack, the natural emotional outcome will be some form of pain. If you react in the opposite way by extending love or forgiveness, the natural emotional outcome will be some form of happiness. Learning to make the choice for love consistently so that you can recognize the innocence of every human being is the reason you are here. Because you object to experiencing certain painful emotions, you do not complete them in the present moment and, in that way, become free of them. You displace them into your physical body, which is actually just a part of a holistic system of ever more subtle bodies. If you persist in avoiding the awareness of emotions you have created, you will go through the motions of living, but much of your life experience will be left unfelt. You will become locked in your old pain and chained to the past.

Did You Know? No one can make you feel anything that you are not already feeling.

If someone began hollering at you for robbing the bank, even though you had not robbed it, you might feel surprised, amused or annoyed, but you would not feel guilty. But what if someone suggested that you were not a good son or daughter to your parents, or that you were not a good parent, a good lover or a good friend? It might cause you to feel guilt and experience a negative emotional reaction. The guilt that you would feel would erupt in you because you were already feeling it deep inside. If you were not already feeling guilty you would probably only feel puzzled about why the person would say such a thing.

To think that someone else can actually make you feel something is to think that they have control over you. It is to say that they could literally get inside you and pull the throttle of your anger, push the guilt button, or steer you into shame, fear or heartbreak.

The emotions you feel are choices sometimes split second decisions that you make in response to outside stimuli. Those stimuli in the present moment trigger similar emotions from the past that are stored in layers inside you, ready to spill out onto the situation at hand. Anger you feel now may have very little to do with the person or situation in front of you. What will you do with that emotion? Lash out at those who have not caused it but only triggered it, or accept responsibility for your feelings and heal them at their source?

When other people act negatively toward you and your own negativity is triggered, you could recognize that negative emotions are a cry for help, and see those emotions as a signpost of what is not working. If, instead, you use them as an excuse to separate yourself from others, you will strengthen your ego and lose an opportunity to heal and increase your emotional intelligence. If you commit to your maturity by choosing to see everyone s negative emotions as an opportunity for healing and advancement, you will help yourself and help the world.

Did You Know? As a child you were probably taught to see your emotions as your enemy, and learned to control them and cut them off.

When you are able to experience life from the center of your heart, you have full emotional awareness. You know what you are feeling. When an event occurs, you interpret what it means in your mind, and you subconsciously generate emotions that align with your interpretation. Depending on your level of maturity, you may or may not act out what you feel.

For example, when you were a small child you had little emotional control, so when you became angry you might have hit someone or broken something. When you were jealous, you might have tried to push over the baby carriage with your younger sibling in it. Because of this lack of emotional control over your actions you got into trouble. Much depended on your environment and how people treated you when you acted on your emotions. Most likely, to stay out of trouble you learned to dissociate, repress and not trust the emotions you created.

When you are dissociated, you are protecting yourself from having to feel anything unpleasant, and so you only let very dramatic experiences of emotions reach your awareness. Unfortunately, you also cut yourself off from any hope of experiencing happiness or love. The more dissociated you become, the more loneliness and depression you lock away inside you.

As you disconnect from life and those around you, you also disconnect from yourself. Metaphorically, this is like cutting the wiring inside you. If you cut a significant wire, it will affect you in many ways. It will disrupt your emotional health, which can lead to lack of physical health.

Did You Know? You have a basic human right to experience your emotions even if those emotions are not noble or positive.

You have the right to feel any emotion that comes up in you simply because it is yours. It may well be that you do not give yourself permission to feel certain emotions, especially anger. You were trained throughout your childhood and youth to deny that very basic and natural emotion. It is important for you to acknowledge your anger when you create it, not because it is true or noble to be angry, but because the denial of the anger causes you damage. And, if you do not allow yourself to be aware of your anger, you can never develop true intimacy with another.

You can only suppress or repress anger for so long. After awhile your self-healing mechanism will confront you with some small, irritating event that will awaken the store of anger within you and you will explode, dumping your upset on an innocent bystander.

One of the reasons you don t want to feel your anger is because you don't realize you can feel your anger safely without hurting anyone. Yet you are no longer a small child who has no control over what you say and do. You can feel anger without projecting it outward onto someone else. If you can feel your anger this way, without acting it out, you will become safe to be around for the first time.

d You Know? There are no bottomless pits of emotion within you.

You probably try to avoid deep and powerful experiences of emotion because you are afraid you will fall into a bottomless well of feeling that you cannot escape. Fortunately, there are no bottomless wells of emotion within you. Even the most powerful repressed emotions are contained and stored away in manageable portions. More like buckets than wells, these containers have a distinct beginning and end. The understanding and loving support of another is a valuable, though not necessary, ingredient for you to allow powerful unpleasant emotions to move through your awareness and be healed. Whether it is in childhood or adulthood, if there is support, acceptance and encouragement, you can find the courage to feel any emotion.

It may help to motivate you toward healing to know that you are already always feeling all of your repressed emotion; you are simply dissociating from your awareness of it. By allowing the pain to come into your awareness, you are able to move through it into a state of grace and gratitude.

About The Author:

Chuck Spezzano, Ph.D is a world-renowned counsellor, trainer, author, lecturer and visionary leader. He holds a Doctorate in Psychology. From 30 years of counselling experience and 26 years of psychological research and seminar leadership, Dr Spezzano and his wife, Lency, created the breakthrough therapeutic healing model Psychology of Vision. The impact of this model has brought deep spiritual, emotional and material change to thousands of participants from around the world.