As I stated, emotions can upset the balance of your intentions and throw you off course. Emotions are, rightfully, considered to be important for any spiritual practice. I don’t feel the need to cover these in too much depth; especially after that lengthy post about intentions. I do have some quick things I want to go over because:
They are important
They tie into a lot of healing work and practices
They are integral to when I talk about the Ego later
First and foremost, we experience emotions. We are NOT the emotions. That is something I and many others learn as we grow along our spiritual paths. We learn to let the emotions flow and pass through us. We learn that when we are experiencing an emotion strongly we need to stop and ask, “What triggered this?” We come to understand situations better and how to better control how we handle ourselves in those states. I was experiencing some extreme agitation just before I decided to get started writing this post. I had to pause and go into a light meditative state to figure out why. Once I understood it, I did what I needed to release heavy emotional states.
The trick is to pause and identify the emotion. Name it and seek to understand it. What you do not want to do is say, “I am agitated.” When you say those words, “I am,” you are taking on the emotion as a part of yourself. The more you do that the more you experience the emotion. The emotion begins to take up residence in your mind and you eventually become what you already said you were.
Most people reading this are probably going to associate that with anger, agitation, sadness, etc. All of the heavy emotions we don’t like. It is just as unhealthy to do that with the more pleasant emotions. Think of a terminally happy person. I talked a little about this earlier and mentioned Robin Williams. It goes further than that. People who have taken on happiness or joy as a part of themselves always exude that persona. And when they do ask for help they are not taken as seriously.
Love is often touted as the most powerful force in the universe. Love is not a force though. It is an emotion. More wars have been fought because of love than any other emotion. Love is an emotion that we have to be careful with. A little too much and we can become obsessive, possessive, domineering, or violently ready to protect it. Too little and we can lose out on good things because we come across distant or cold. Is love powerful? Yes but only when it is tempered with strong values and actual forces of the Mind.
Every emotion is capable of being destructive or creative. There is no such thing as a good or bad emotion. There is a healthy and unhealthy use of emotions. Then there are strong emotions.
Strong emotions, like love, are typically brought on by an extreme set of conditions or a buildup of previous emotions. They exist on spectrums. For example, sorrow and grief are one extreme of happiness while the other extremes are joy and bliss. Most people would associate sorrow and grief with sadness. They would be right. Happiness and sadness exist on the same spectrum. Just as hate and love exist on the same spectrum as anger and lust or attraction. They can morph and flow from the central, more easily dealt with emotions towards the extremes or strong emotions.
Our society sees a lot of hate being thrown around right now. It seems that everyone wants to combat it with either more hate or its opposite strong emotion, love. I choose indifference. I choose to not feed the hate with either love or more hate. The more we turn away from feeding it the more we take away the power it has. That was a lesson I had to learn about forgiveness, which we will go in-depth about with forces of the Mind. Forgiveness is a tool of justice because it breaks ties that perpetuate cycles of pain.
Indifference kind of straddles the line between being a force of the Mind and being an emotion itself. The way it works is when we are in balance and check with our emotional well-being we learn to create a kind of emotional barrier. With this barrier in place, we decide what we allow in and what projects outward. Indifference is that barrier acting as a filter. If we are constantly projecting love to fight hate we still have an imbalance because we are showing that we hate the hate by saying we are “fighting the hate.” That spectrum I talked about earlier does not have an endpoint, it is more like a circle. Love can eventually cross over to becoming hate itself. When we act in indifference we starve both sides of the conflict.
Think about it, how do you fight hate with love? Angry words or snarky retorts? Hopes and prayers have become a rhetorical meme. Sunshine, daisies, roses, and kisses? That hate stems from something. And it cannot be fought with love. It can only be starved. Only give it attention where the attention is needed, for example in voting against unfair laws. I am not saying don’t take a stand against what you don’t believe in. I am saying to evaluate, understand, and develop actionable solutions. Acting emotionally is acting irrationally. Acting rationally understands the emotional influence but does not give into emotional states.
Earlier I mentioned lust. Lust is considered one of the 7 Deadly Sins to most modern society. The rest being greed, gluttony, pride, wrath, sloth, and envy. All of these are strong emotional states but I see them as catalysts instead of deadly sins. I have even started calling them the 7 Catalysts of Change. I see where we go through six cycles in society as a whole. Each one of those cycles is spurned on by lust, greed, envy, gluttony, sloth, and pride. As a current cycle ends there is the experience of wrath. Simply said, when things get really bad, change is coming. We go through these cycles in our lives as well and we don’t always welcome or accept change despite how much it is needed. One of the most dangerous phrases we can say is, “That’s the way it's always been.” That phrase leaves no room for growth, innovation, or creativity. We stifle ourselves and society as a whole when we utter that nonsense. The 7 Catalysts of Change arise when we are no longer content with “how it's always been.”
The sex movement of the 80’s and 90’s was led primarily by female musicians. Madonna and Salt N Peppa are two amazing examples of this. This lust-inspired moment in time has given women power back to be who they are. And the movement continues. My neighbor had some visitors one day and they, two guys, started to make all kinds of jokes about her because she openly told them how many sexual partners they had in the past. One of the guys looked at me, I happened to be outside when this happened, and asked, “How many dudes does a girl have to sleep with before she is considered a ho?” I looked at him and said, “I guess the same amount of women a dude sleeps with before he is considered one.” He stopped cold in his tracks and said, “Ok…you got me there. And he ended up apologizing to her.” I didn’t react emotionally or heatedly. I stated a rational answer to his illogical question.
The point is if you pay attention to society when emotions are running high you are going to notice:
Some kind of change is coming.
Something is out of balance.
People are picking sides.
Someone is screaming they want pity. They want someone to agree with them and only them.
Strong resistance on both ends.
To walk a spiritual lifestyle is to see these things and put up a wall of indifference. Once the wall is up we take note and seek understanding. Most of the time, what we come to understand is to let change happen.
That is the goal of being in control of your emotions. You want to get to a place where you can express that you experienced an emotional state and understand why you experienced it. This helps your Mind grow into something formidable because you are shaken up less. Expression of emotion is what I said earlier, “I experienced (emotion). Why? Oh, that’s why. Ok, I know to be aware of that in the future.” Projecting emotions is allowing them to take control of you and there’s just a whole bag of consequences stemming from that.
For the Mind to function properly in its role we have to create a type of control against intrusions of emotions. Emotions are the direct result of energetic signals our Body is receiving. The Mind is going to translate those signals into emotions and the emotions are signals that we have something to do or to work on.
Thank you so much for reading. If there is anything I hope you take away from this is to just be aware that you are not your emotions. Once you can create that separation life has a way of changing drastically from how we view things to our interactions.
I hope you have a great day and do something kind for yourself today. You deserve it.
Commentaires