February is the month of LOVE and love is the superpower emotion. Love is connecting and healing. Try using love to shift a difficult situation. It’s magic! But, love is also why we grieve and why we anger. It’s been said that all emotions filter down to a spectrum of love and fear.
Our emotional vocabulary needs to be expanded as our society has been trained to suppress emotions. Expressing every emotion may not be prudent in every situation, but it is important to feel every emotion and then use the physical sensations in the body and the thoughts of the mind to really understand what is happening beneath the surface of our consciousness. The emotional body is the ruler over how we feel about our experience. With a balanced mental body and a healthy physical body, our emotions can become more positive and peaceful.
Like the mental body, the emotional body has two parts.
Think of being happy, excited, and thrilled. When you feel into these you may begin to identify with things that make you feel that way. Imagine you had to act those words out. You would use large movements and expressions. The same if you had to act out angry, scared, or sad. They hold and extroverted energy. We can easily identify these emotions and I call them action emotions.
The other side of the emotional body experiences what I call states-of-being. In this place, we feel but the feelings hold introverted energy. If I had to act out peace, or bliss, or calm; see how portraying those would be a little different? These experiences are more obscure. They are more a state of being than a feeling. The negative side or degenerating states, as opposed to regenerating, would be things like feeling numb or checked out, anxious, or shame as opposed to guilt which motivates change.
There is an amazing psychologist Dr. Jonice Webb. I was able to interview her on The Wholeness Network Podcast. She shares the science behind emotions, and it is her life’s mission to help those that were not given enough emotional support in childhood. Research has found that not enough emotional attunement with caretakers actually changes the way the brain developed.
Emotions! They are vital to living with vitality.
Trauma flips the degenerating states on. I’m not entirely sure if we would have these states without trauma remembering that traumatic experiences are defined on an individual basis and that trauma is the physiological response, not a physiological or thought process.
Living in these degenerating states one is unable to make decisions effectively. It’s hard to focus. Anger may rise quicker than perhaps it should. Overwhelm is a common state.
If you do not understand these states then you have a power that the rest of us do not. I ask you to use that power with empathy. Those of us that may be experiencing these physiological states do not have the capacity to react and act the way you might believe we should. Try love. Just try supporting with love.
There is an unconscious desire we have to only experience what we would call positive emotions. One morning I was asking and listening, and I realized that I felt joy every day. This was a time in my life I would identify as one of my most difficult. But, every day I did smile, laughed, or looked at the beauty in the world with awe. I had moments of joy every day and that meant I was living a joy-filled life. I am not quite able to define this moment because it sounds like I was telling myself I just needed to pull myself together and be happy, but it was different. It felt like a relief at the time because the lesson was more about my judgment of the anger, grief, sorrow, and fear that I felt defined my life. In this beautiful moment, I saw more clearly that I couldn’t have the joy without the sorrow.