Get to Know Your Emotional Self – it will Change Your Life for the Better

I vividly remember, back in my corporate days, a chiropractor asking me details about the symptoms I was having in my neck and back and when those symptoms were at their worst. I had no idea. I was so distracted and busy most of the time, I was only aware of the tension in a generalised area.

I remember the relationships that ended, with little awareness of the patterns of feelings and behaviours that point to a time long before the relationship began, rather than being ‘a fault’ of the person I was with. It took many repetitions of things unwanted before I finally looked in my own mirror to address what was going on.

This is the result of a past where, probably like most of you, I was taught to suppress how I feel. It set me up for a lifetime of guilt, frustration, resentment, anger, disappointment and, most importantly, a lack of self-awareness – until I became aware of it.

Today, if my neck or back is tense, I can pin down which vertebrae the pain stems from, which side I feel it on, where it then tracks throughout my body and when it feels worse or better. Today, whether things are going badly or well, the first place I usually look is in the mirror. Today I am more aware than ever of how my feelings and corresponding thoughts shape my life.

I was listening to Teal Swan talk about emotions; she was asserting that the most pervasive – and damaging – form of abuse is emotional.  And it’s not necessarily the type of abuse you might be thinking of, like emotional blackmail for example, it’s the chronic everyday abuse that occurs from having to suppress our emotions.

A typical example she gave of how this arises was of a child having a hissy fit over a candy bar that the parent had said “no” to at the store. Generally you might hear the parent telling the child how inappropriate their response is, especially since they may only have just eaten a candy bar.

Yet it’s that very act, of deeming any emotion as appropriate or inappropriate, good or bad, which is damaging. She wasn’t suggesting that the parent give in and get the candy bar, just that they acknowledge the emotion (maybe something like “I can understand how you must feel, at my age I’d probably have wanted the candy bar as badly as you do and I’d be feeling powerless and angry too.”)

It is about feeling the emotion rather than suppressing it.

This isn’t about parenting, although that is important, it’s about you and I; the inner child within us that experienced these scenarios. It is about recognizing the damage it caused to us, and creating awareness of the root of our self doubts, anxieties, fears, neurosis and even illness.

Let’s face it, I feel the way I feel, there is no conscious decision in that initial emotion, it just is what it is. By making certain emotions ‘bad’ it creates guilt. Worse, if it becomes about me, rather than just the way I’m feeling or acting, it creates shame. Shame is an emotion that is possibly the most harmful of all.
 
In the vast majority of cases much of the suppression of our emotions has come from well meaning people, our parents, who wanted to teach us how to fit in to our society. For thousands of years, displaying emotions has been seen as a weakness, yet we feel them in response to everything we are experiencing, including each thought and even in response to the energy of others’ emotions around us.

As pointed to by Donna Eden and David Feinstein in their book The Energies of Love, the electromagnetic field of the heart (which has sixty times the amplitude of the brain’s field) extends a number of feet beyond each of us, radiating in all directions. This field can transmit emotions.

As Donna and David discovered, the electromagnetic signals produced by your heart are registered in the brains of people around you. If two people are within conversational distance, fluctuations in the heart signal of one correspond with fluctuations in the brainwaves of the other.

Harold Burr, a neuroanatomist in the 1930’s, was the first to demonstrate each living thing is born with a completely unique energy structure that determines its physical growth through the electrical fields that surround it and electrical impulses that move through it. Burr was also able to distinguish electrical patterns that corresponded with health and illness.

In recent decades, more books have appeared that link symptoms of the varying illnesses we experience to very specific thought patterns stemming from the suppression of varying emotions.  My personal favourite is Lise Bourbeau’s book Your Body’s Telling You: Love Yourself.

For example, the common cold – symptomatic of congestion in your body – corresponds to the ‘congested’ thoughts in our head and feeling overwhelmed; trying to do too much at once or over-thinking things. But even the more serious and more deadly of illnesses has a corresponding emotional and thought pattern.

The ridiculous thing is that we are just beginning to open up to the enormously important role our emotions play in our life experiences. It is not yet common to encounter a medical practitioner who will take this approach with patients, which is far more relevant and helpful to a full recovery than anything else.

In fact, it is not yet common to find anyone in any traditional position of authority – be it a teacher in the classroom, or a policeman, a judge, or the politician making the laws, to understand the role emotions play, and the damage their suppression causes. To many this still sounds hocus.

This stems from millennia of patriarchal societies which have been rapidly eroding in recent decades as feminine traits are becoming more valued and empowered globally. The old systems are still hanging on in there, just. I suspect I will see many more changes in my own lifetime as the speed of change increases, I know I certainly hold a vision for a more evolved world than this one.

I believe that starts with each of us becoming consciously aware of what we are thinking and how we are feeling more of the time. Our emotions are our connection with our inner knowing, our intuition. This is a vital connection to living our best life, to the source of our internal power. This is connection we want thriving, not suppressed.

Consider this, can you imagine living your life free of guilt? Can you imagine living your life from the standpoint of fully loving and accepting who you are? Can you imagine living your life in a way that allows you to look at the challenges more objectively, as a jumping off point to grow from?

Can you imagine fully experiencing your impulses and intuition rather than having only a vague awareness of something more that only manages to surface now and then?

And consider this, can you imagine a world in which more and more people are acting from this point of being more consciously aware of what they think and feel? And more loving and accepting of themselves?

It starts with you, becoming more consciously aware of who you are, the patterns of thoughts and emotions you have, and taking control of them. It is not a quick process, but you can get small, immediate results by just opening up to the possibility and pursuing this in whatever way works for you.

For me, it has been a combined process of meditating regularly, to be able to start being the observer of my thoughts and feelings rather than wholly identifying with them, together with reading, listening and watching things that inspire and challenge me – and trying things that might facilitate more speedy awareness and release of unwanted patterns, like guided meditations, tapping and the whole world of healing that exists when I started to open up to it.

I invite you to get to know yourself in this way and look forward to the results it creates for all of us.

If what you read here resonates you may enjoy reading Meditation – the Cornerstone to Your Success. If you’d like a fresh perspective (and only that, it’s not advice you have to take or act upon) on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me or click here for further information. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.