Harnessing The Strength of Your Emotions (Part 3 of 5) Establishing Your Foundation

 

Welcome to Understanding the “Emotional Body!”

Emotions are the collection of every feeling we have ever experienced.  They provide us with insight and guidance into stimuli around us and they tell us where we should go and who we should stay away from. Emotions or feelings can be very powerful; but, they can also be very confusing.

Let’s break down the steps to understand and empower ourselves using our emotions.

So, how much do you think your emotions affect you?

Do you even know?

Some of us get controlled by our circumstances and some of us attempt to turn off our feelings. Processing and controlling emotions is a delicate balance. When we don’t understand and process feelings such as hurt and pain properly our “Emotional Body” gets weakened.

Not knowing how to organize our feelings can make handling emotional situations difficult. Understanding, organizing, and managing our emotional body and the feelings associated with it is just as important as understanding how our physical body works.

Imagine not exercising or eating well for 25 years.  How do you think you would physically feel?   Probably not very well! Now, imagine ignoring your emotions for 25 years, how healthy do you think your emotional body is going to be? The emotions may not show up physically but the neglect manifests in other ways.  I compare it not to not doing your  your taxes. The IRS is going to audit you. Ignoring emotions is just like ignoring those taxes, the situation is not going to go away. Eventually old hurt and pain is going to come back just like those taxes.  Imagine having to go back 25 years or so into your emotional memory and trying to remember everything you experienced.  It would be like trying to find and sort through all the receipts you ever purchased in your life. Digging into our past and our emotions can be just as difficult as trying to remember what you purchased 19 years ago at the grocery store. So the idea is to process through difficult emotions as soon as possible and effectively as possible as not to perpetuate and extend the process.

No wonder so many people don’t want to handle their feelings. Imagine trying to take every single feeling a human has ever felt throughout their entire life, translate it, evaluate it, and then attempt to process the lesson.  That sounds exhausting and who knows if the individual actually learned the lesson properly. But, that is exactly what we do when we don’t deal with loss and pain. We try and take short cuts and feebly attempt to tuck away emotions, sweeping them under the rug, and then act surprised when eruptions happens. Unhealed wounds have a way of manifesting themselves in other avenues.

Let’s go with a pretty common phenomenon as a first example here. Have you ever seen somebody “blush” before?  It’s a relatively common physical reaction and it happens pretty quickly.  The blush could be due to anything: embarrassment, fear, rage, happiness, or any other emotion or combination thereof.  When it happens, it’s as if the body reacts before the person has an opportunity to explain what’s going on.  The cheeks, chest, and neck flush for a few seconds and then by the time the “blushee” regains their composure and starts talking, the blush is gone.  That’s how fast our “Emotional Body” can handle situations.  It’s almost instantaneous. By the time our brain is engaged, the “Emotional Body” is already moving on to the next reaction.  At this point, what needs to happen is the “Emotional Body” needs to work with the “Mental Body” to appropriately read the situation, evaluate what to do, and then determine what mood to the extend on with.  It’s almost like a runner handing off a baton in a race.

In “7 Ways to Balance our Physical Bodies (Part 2 of 5) Establishing our Foundation” we learned about how important it is to strengthen our physical bodies, so let’s compare our physical body to our emotional body.

French Fries vs Feelings

Physical Body vs Emotional Body

Some people have difficulty with saying “no” to their feelings just like some people have difficulty saying “no” to French fries.  Well, maybe a lot of us have difficulty saying “no” to French fries. And, maybe, a lot of us also have that same difficulty saying “no” to our emotions and we just might not recognize it.

The biggest difference in controlling grabbing a French fry and controlling not losing our temper is that French fries are sitting right in the middle of the table in eye-sight and our emotions are invisible. Seeing and being able touch and taste a French fry and smell their deliciousness makes it much easier to wrap our minds around what a French fry actually is.

A French fry is a French fry, period!

Because we can touch them, we can make the connection that French fries are potatoes fried in oil and they have calories. The calories in those French fries make our pants tight and for some reason, it makes sense to us that we shouldn’t eat so many. Exhibiting self-control doesn’t always work though, and we have trouble sometimes saying no to our emotions or eating the entire basket.

Emotions are a little different than French fries though. The emotions we feel are invisible and the importance of an emotion might be diminished or overlooked all together because we can’t see their affect.  Think back to a person “blushing” or imagine a person punching you because they got angry.  If that person hadn’t blushed or given you a black eye, would their emotion be as real or powerful?

Probably not, because if  they kept their feelings inside you would have never known what they were feeling unless you were really skilled at reading someone else’s emotions without sensory cues. We as humans like to be able to touch, taste, smell, hear, and see things.  Being able to touch something makes it feel real. We might not acknowledge a feeling; but, we will certainly notice if someone eats the last French fry out of the basket.

So, which is more REAL and more Powerful: the Physical Body aka “French fries” or our Emotional Body aka “our feelings?”

The answer is BOTH!   They both have the same importance. The physical body is just as real and powerful as our invisible emotions and feelings.

Each of the 4 Bodies play critical roles in our whole foundation being balanced.  Being balanced with our physical body, emotional body, mental body, and spiritual body gives us strength to overcome obstacles and tackle challenges. When one body is out of alignment, the other bodies attempt to compensate.  When our foundation is strong we are calmer, more in control, and more in-tune to our inner strength and wisdom.  The key is to harness the strength of each of the bodies and not let any of them get too weak or too out of control. BALANCE.

So, let’s learn how to  how to get control of our emotions and harness their power:

The first thing we have to do is acknowledge our feelings and understand what they are and how to express them in a healthy fashion. We can’t let them control us and we can’t repress them.

A healthy emotional body is listening and understanding to what our emotions are trying to tell us and allowing them to give us insight and information without over-reacting or underestimating their importance.

Let’s tackle understanding our “Emotional Body” from 2 different angles and attempt to understand both sides.

Some of us let our emotions control us and some of us repress emotions.  Both behaviors are unbalanced and require remediation.

1. Those who allow their emotions to control them:

These individuals have trouble controlling feelings and allow emotions to consume behavior. This exposes a difficulty with controlling moods and feelings and makes individuals feel and appear like they lack self control. Examples of behaviors of individuals who lack the ability to control their feeling are: allowing one’s temper to rage, saying things unintentionally, and acting out in physical rage, passion, fear, or excitement.   These are all examples of emotional overreaction to stimuli.

Major Steps to Intervention:

1. Individuals who allow emotions to control them have to first recognize the situation.   Emotions are a reaction to situation or person. By, allowing the emotion to consume and control their moods, stress and anxiety are elevated. Highs become manic and lows become unbearable.  Losing a temper or being over excited might start off innocently enough but with lack of self control the highs and lows can both become unmanageable.
2. Those who over-react have to learn how to control what they feel.

2. Those who repress their emotions: 

The exact opposite is true for those who repress feelings. Those who repress and ignore feelings typically see the mania and lows that emotions cause and attempt to use logic or thoughts to evaluate and solve situations instead of feelings.  Behaviors of these individuals include: emotional coldness, dryness, and distancing of anything that is indicative of too high or low of a energetic frequency or vibration. For example, individuals who repress emotions may be intolerant to those who exhibit highs and lows such as: hysterical excitement, extreme sadness, absolute disgust, surprise, fear, or absolute joy.  They look at individuals who feel these highs and lows as unable to find a suitable medium “mood or feeling”- so their solution is to “turn off” emotions as to not be consumed or controlled by their feelings.

This behavior modification is a defense mechanism in an attempt to avoid the being overwhelmed and controlled.  Those who repress feelings typically start off by shutting down one emotion typically intense pain or sadness and as the individual turns off that pain, the other emotions follow suit. Those who repress their feelings might feel like they have everything under control because their moods appear “balanced” but, what they don’t understand is that emotions, like a volcano, will eventually erupt if not handled and processed. Those who repress their feelings actually have more work to do and more to overcome than those who allow themselves to feel, be overwhelmed, and lose control.

Major Steps to Intervention:

1. Those who repress their feelings must tap down into the core of their being and observe why they initially decided to repress their feelings, heal the emotional wound that initially caused the pain, and then learn coping mechanisms to control and harness emotions effectively.
2. Those who don’t allow themselves to feel- first have to open themselves up, go through the emotional rollercoaster everyone else does, then learn how to balance them.

Let’s make a list of emotions so we know we are dealing with:

There are numerous theories about how many emotions there are. To get a basic understanding, let’s look at Robert Plutchik’s theory.  His findings state that there are 8 basic emotions and here is a diagram of his Wheel of Emotions.

 

Another theory is from Book 2 of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. It goes into the moods and how emotions are temporary states of mind such as: 

1. Anger
2. Friendship
3. Fear
4. Shame
5. Kindness
6. Pity
7. Indignation
8. Envy
9. Love

Both of these theories explain how emotions can be understood and categorized.  By understanding how emotions can be organized we can determine which emotions we want to transition into long term moods.

Here are 4 Steps to Harnessing Your Emotions:

1. Feel Your Emotions– Allow yourself to feel your emotions: regardless how good/bad or high/low.  Experience the physical manifestations of feelings: racing heartbeats, the tight muscles, the muscle pain, dry mouth, butterflies, upset stomach, and associated bodily and physical reactions.
2. Understand Your Emotions– Take an inventory of what is happening and recognize why you feel the way you do. Write down your thoughts and feelings about what you are feeling and identify patterns of emotional ups and downs. Keep in mind that life is not black and white.  Live through the experience and allow yourself to balance out.  Consider what you can control and accept what you cannot.
3. Control Your Emotions– Develop behaviors that help distract you from negative emotions, such as exercise and breathing techniques. Also reach out to professionals counselors, friends and support networks to help you improve your outlook.  Also recognize your behaviors when emotions are very positive.  Pay attention to what happiness and bliss feel like. Do the same for negative feelings.  Recognize the differences and similarities. Evaluate ways to recognize, maintain, balance, and elevate positive behaviors to aid in elevating over all emotions to reach higher levels of satisfaction without crashing.
4. Harness Your Emotions– Allow yourself to feel the emotions as they come and use the bad feelings as a way to push away negative and unattractive and allow the positive experiences to empower and excite you. Tap into ways to explore your emotions and begin paying attention to other emotions as well. With practice, recognizing emotions will become easier and you will be able to understand what you and others around you feel without them having to spell it out with physical reactions. Meditating is also a great way to harness the strength of emotions.

Emotions can be beautiful and powerful tools when used properly.  Sensory language is based on emotional cues and the Latin root of the word emotion is “movere” to move, so in Latin an emotion is described as our “energy in motion.” In Old French the root is  “emouvour” to stir up, so to the French an emotion is the movement of what is inside of us. The Emotional Body is where the memory of everything emotional is stored and by tapping into those feelings we can understand more than what our other bodies can offer us.

Reading emotions properly and handling our own in a balanced fashion gives us strength.  The emotions are where thoughts and feelings and the energy associated with each is kept, they can run the gamut and can be beautiful or seemingly awful. By taking an inventory and processing each situation with an open mind and open heart we can evaluate what causes us pain and what gives us strength.  Instead of hiding from our emotions we can tap into them to feed us unlimited strength and empower us with unrelenting resolve. The key is to not get lost in the labyrinth of loss and pain and cut out the emotional body all together.  The emotional body is as powerful and important as all of the other bodies and disconnecting from it’s strength will cause weakness to show up in other ways.

Love, Success, & Positive Energy

~Theresa