Emotions 2
How do you know you are alive? There are lots of clues but one of the biggest is our emotions.
If you’re anything like me, you find that your emotions use your mind and body as their playground. While they are playing, there is a certain aliveness within us that we don’t often recognize. This aliveness acts as a fuel.
It propels us to do things – some worthwhile; others not.
One of the primary emotions is fear and it has the highest octane. It’s the one we feel the most. The late Dr. Dave Dobson claimed it was the only emotion we were born with. He said all the other ones were derivatives of fear.
Motivational guru, Tony Robbins held seminars encouraging people to turn their fear into power. That’s certainly one alternative.
What do you do with your fear? If you’re like most, you ignore the actual feeling and just talk about it. That has two consequences:
- You water down the aliveness that fear brings.
- You keep the insidious thought of fear alive in your mind.
What you do with fear is the difference between being alive and feeling alive.
The walking dead are alive; they just don’t feel it. They talk about it.
Ignoring our emotions, or pretending they are not there, is a prescription for misery. Again, most people attempt to talk this misery away. That’s like trying to talk a dog off a meat wagon.
The lesson worth learning is to use our emotions to fuel our lives and our aliveness.
There is no need to find out “why” you are emotional. That just leads to more talk. And as Dr. Robert Anthony taught me many years ago, “You’re never upset for the reason you think.”
It’s best to notice the feeling of the emotion in your body. Where does it register? It’s usually somewhere along the midline from our throat to our bowels.
Once you sense where the emotion lives in your body, you can give it your full attention and then just watch what happens.
When you feel the sensation attached to an emotion, you are using its fuel to propel you towards actions you may not have taken had you kept the idea of the emotion cooped up in your head.
This is not to be confused with psyching yourself up. That’s a poor use of energy. It usually has meager, temporary and, oftentimes, counter-productive results. It’s just more talk.
Locating and feeling the sensation of an emotion triggers your aliveness and moves you through the emotion to a more peaceful place. You may never get there if you don’t give your emotions the recognition they deserve.
How alive are you? It depends on how much attention you’re willing to give to your emotions. They bring the fuel to drive you towards peace, and the actionable answers a peaceful state brings.
All the best,
John
http://cdbaby.com/cd/johnmorgan
http://www.cafepress.com/grasshoppernote/3580301
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