Emotional awareness

In much the same way that we have a physical body – we also have an emotional body – our physical body allows us, through our skin to sense textures and the temperature of what we are touching and our emotional body works very much the same way.

Our emotional body allows us to notice that an emotion is there, that it has a feeling, a strength, a location – it can feel nice and it can feel uncomfortable too. Emotions are much more controllable than most people expect.

Strangely, we tend to use the fear of our emotions, the fear of those occasionally overwhelming emotions to believe the stories that we have running in our minds, about “what might happen” – yet, after whatever emotional experience is done, we are still here and our emotions are gone, emotions are very transient and they are very interruptible too.

I’d suggest you don’t use that story that your emotions will overwhelm you, to be afraid. Sometimes they take us for a ride, but it is not really the emotions that take us for a ride. They are not the problem. – The problem is the stories we tell ourselves in our mind, the ones that we believe so powerfully that take us into that emotion. Stories about what we can do, about what we think we can’t do, about how good enough we are, what people will think of us. They are the real issues, the emotion we feel are just what we experience because we bought into those stories so completely – and the truth is you can step out of those stories and you can change the emotions you feel too.

Realising the stories in your mind are not necessarily true

After working with me for a while you will understand this and realise that you can create emotions and that you can dissolve emotions – you will become more and more aware that your emotions are not something to be afraid of. They are just indicators of what stories you have bought into. I doubt if anybody would have ever shown you that you can create your own emotions, that you can decrease them, increase them, that you are the creator of those emotions, be it consciously or unconsciously, and that you can consciously create any emotion that you choose.

I’ve found that understanding this point can have a profound impact on your life, just knowing that you can pick an emotion and create it is quite extraordinary. No one ever told me that’s how you became happy, it took me good a while to figure out that I can create my own happiness, that I didn’t have to be dependent on anybody else to do it – knowing that this was a function of my will and of my intent took some mastering and getting a hold of.

What I am asking you to realize is; that emotions are a result of your intent to create, it may have been a result of a story you created in your mind of what might happen or what someone might think, what they said – we use our intent to create the story in our mind and a byproduct of this story are the emotions we experience. My experience is that emotions are largely just a feedback mechanism, just like in our physical body, when we touch something hot we get the feedback through our hand – same thing with emotions, but emotions don’t get created by touch, they get created by the stories, pictures, the thoughts and voices in our mind.

Understanding emotions

If we believe a story about ourselves, that we are ugly, that we are unworthy, that we are stupid, we create a story about ourselves that we believe (even if it is not true) and so, we get the feeling of being unworthy, we get a feeling of being stupid, and we get a feeling of being worse than something or somebody else. If at another time we do something successful and we feel great about ourselves, we believe that story about ourselves and the emotion we get is fabulous or whatever word is appropriate, wonderful, self-love – and we get that emotion because we are believing in that story. The emotion is a byproduct of believing in that story.

Yet, one of the big mistakes we make is, we use the emotion we feel as evidence to back up our story, take for example; if something didn’t go well, we think we are a failure, and somebody asks us, “how do you feel” and since you feel like a failure? – that feeling is something we interpret as some kind of proof that we actually are a failure.

We believe we are failure and because we believe it, we get the feeling of unworthiness – and that brings us down a peg and it feels like that belief is now true. We have the emotional support to backup that story, and we start to use that feeling as evidence that the story is true. People ask, “How do you know you are a failure?” It is like “I can just feel it.” – If we believe we are not lovable, then no matter how many people love us, we do not feel lovable and we have the emotional experience to support that story.

Help to manage your emotions

I can help you learn to become aware of your emotions and the thoughts that unconsciously fire them off, these thoughts are often based in what I call FEAR (Future Events Appearing Real) where you make big pictures in your mind of all the things that could go wrong and then often start an uncomfortable emotional journey towards a self fulfilling prophecy.

By teaching you how this works and explaining how the internal dialogue (voices in your mind) trick you and the games they play, you can begin to take back control of your emotional states.

No longer the victim of your emotions, you are so much more free to do the things that you want to do, if you know what they are! (and that’s another story).

My practice is in Buckingham, Buckinghamshire where I specialise in helping people to manage their emotions and take back control – Give me a call on 01280 823059 let’s have a chat about what is possible.