Categories
Diana's Spirit Care Blog Articles

Meditating About, Understanding, and Coping With Emotions, Part One

Life is a roller coaster ride of emotions. You’ve felt so many emotions in the course of your life! Looking back on your life, you may wonder how you made it through everything. But you did.

When we are having an emotional experience we can easily lose perspective of the situation, as well as lose sight of the bigger picture of life itself. Very strong feelings distort how we perceive and what we are able to understand in the moment. This can seriously muddle our thinking and make things worse… putting us too deep in the forest to see the trees, as they say.

When we get muddled it’s time to step away from what we feel, through the process of meditation…or just getting very still…and let go of the feeling so we can find our core self. The core self is the eternal spiritual being that we are, under the emotions, behind the circumstance, and before the ego personality of this life was formed.

Family Tree of Emotions

People aren’t the only created beings with relatives. Emotions and thoughts have birthdays and relations of their own. By tracing the roots of your emotions and pairing them up with the thoughts that gave birth to them, you can get to the core cause of many of your most troubling emotions.

Relatives on your emotional family tree are much worse than slothful cousins or meddling in-laws: they can crash your best parties and whip you into a weeping puddle without a moment’s notice.

The “Family Tree of Emotions” exercise is designed to help you when you are struggling to figure out why you feel the way you do. The diagram shown here has blank boxes that spiral inward. You can sketch your own on a separate piece of paper.

Suppose you are struggling with a feeling of sadness. Write “sad” in the first box at the beginning of the spiral.

Then, ask why do you think you are sad? If your answer is something like, “I’m depressed because John won’t call me, then write that down in the next box.  If your deeper belief is “…it means he doesn’t care”, then write that perception in the next blank box.

“Nobody really cares about me”…”My brother said I was a pain in the butt” …”I remember when he…” and so on, progressively working your way to the core beliefs that are hidden behind the screen of the emotion you are dealing with.

How Emotions Happen

Emotion begins with a perception, followed by a thought that incites a feeling inside you. For example, as a kid you may have had the perception that someone was making fun of you as you saw them smile when you tripped on a shoestring. An incorrect perception (the belief you were being mocked) was followed by an incorrect thought, “she’s making fun of me!” which could have given rise to an emotion of feeling embarrassed or put down. Later in life, then, the root experience could lead you to become overly self-conscious and sensitive. —All this for nothing, since the reality at the time of the occurrence  was that the person was smiling because of your childhood charm. (You were terribly cute all the time!)

Perceptions vs. Reality

The trouble with emotions is that they can “talk” us into believing our own story. We believe that what we perceive is a fact and thus, we can believe that feelings of anger, sadness, fear, etc. are not only justified, we can believe them to be unavoidable.

We often let emotions control our outlook on life, our thoughts, our behavior and our choices. Thus, they  have an enormous effect on the way we live our lives. But there is something we can do about that, which is why at My Spirit Care we provide extended spiritual coaching to enable a balance and spiritual power over the “emotional dictator” that so often inhibits life progress.

Next Post: Part Two, Becoming the Master of Your Emotions

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Diana's Spirit Care Blog Articles

Meditating About, Understanding, and Coping With Emotions, Part Two

Part Two: Becoming the Master of Your Emotions

(Continued from Part One, click here to read.)


In the Grip of Emotion

When we are having a very strong emotional experience, we can feel only that emotion in the moment. Sensible perspective flies out the window! With that loss of perspective, we compound the intensity of the emotion through the power of focused attention. For example, during a powerful unhappy state we might feel as if we’ve always been miserable, always will be miserable and thereby we can literally trap ourselves in misery by faulty loop-de-loop thinking.

Avoid Reacting to Negative Emotion

At My Spirit Care we show you how to care for your own spirit, and this includes coming to the objective realization that you are not your emotions. You are eternal Spirit, Divine Consciousness, unhurt by painful emotions that are processed by your personality in this moment. When we are in terrible emotional states, we need to observe ourselves during these times and to recognize that the emotion of the moment is only a speck in the fabric of time. It will pass.

It’s what we do with the emotion we are having that counts. If we can maintain the presence of mind to remind ourselves when we are having extreme emotions that we are having a temporary state of mind that will pass and that clarity will come later, we can forgo some avoidable mistakes. —Such as lashing out at someone in rage, breaking up a relationship because we just feel like it in that moment, saying terrible things we can’t take back, etc.

Strong emotional states are not the times to make major decisions. So when I say it’s what we do with the emotion that counts, I mean we must recognize it as our own very personal experience and not make it someone else’s problem. It certainly helps to realize that emotions arise from core beliefs which are not the same as “reality as it is.”

We need to learn to control emotion rather than allow emotion to control us. We can acknowledge that emotions run very deep within us and honor ourselves by tracing the roots of our feelings. When we do that, we will find faulty beliefs or self-created deceptions that have in one way or another fueled our present emotional state. When we understand the reality of the situation (a clarity that can only come once emotions are stabilized) we can learn to cope with emotions in a balanced way.

What You Feel Is Real, But it May Not be the Truth of What Is

Reality and perceptions are most often at odds. The old saying, “Things are not what they appear to be,” is very true. Difficult emotions that arise from a resistance to “what is” are simply a symptom of denial. If you are left by a lover and then proceed to tear yourself and your life apart or injure the other person because you are emotionally  out-of-control, you are not taking into account the reality of the situation. Although pain may be unavoidable, one must live through the experience, cope with it, and in time an understanding of the situation will come…when emotions are stabilized.

Sadness is to happiness is what winter is to summer. They are partners in life. Both of these opposites are contained in the exquisite experience of being a Divine spirit in a human body; neither are bad or good…they are mere pieces of the spiraling dynamic of a cosmic existence.

Next Post: Part Three, Emotional Addiction and the Influence of Collective Emotions

Categories
Diana's Spirit Care Blog Articles

Meditating About, Understanding, and Coping With Emotions, Part Three

Part Three: Emotional Addiction and the Influence of Collective Emotions

(Continued from Part Two)

Addiction to Emotions and the Dramas They Create

Did you know that intense emotional states can be addictive? They are. For example, a person who has known mostly depression in life will feel “strange” when not depressed, as if something is not quite right because they are in an unfamiliar feeling state. There are biochemical reasons for this, but there are also energetic reasons. As a clairvoyant who sees auric and other energies, I have observed how the frequency of a particular emotion seeks itself out: sadness is drawn to sadness; happiness to happiness; love to love, and so on. This fact of energetic physics explains why it’s so hard to break out of an emotional loop and why conscious awareness in needed to do so.  At My Spirit Care, we address these energetic issues with those who seek balance in their lives.

Balance is not easy to come by: many people are addicted to energetic/emotional states. They cannot stop the dramas in their lives because they cannot feel alive or powerful unless there is high emotion at play all the time. That’s right: many people are so disconnected from their core identity that they feel dead inside unless they are all worked up about something. This is a deeply destructive pattern that blocks all genuine personal growth and higher spiritual connection. Like all problems, however, being aware of it is half the battle. 🙂

Collective Social Emotions & You

One important aspect of experiencing emotional upset is the significant historical time period in which we now live.

This is an Age of upheaval and immense change on the national and world stage. All around, events and situations seem to threaten personal stability whether through war, financial upheaval and economic uncertainty, health challenges brought on by modern stress, etc. Fear is the “emotion dujouer” served up daily in the media, in radical religions that fervently believe in horrific judgments and the End of Days. Government is not responsive to the needs of the common person and we are often frustrated by systems and programs that are inept or unjust.

Many of you are experiencing not only your own emotions, but are being impacted by the “energetic soup” of the mass mind. We are all connected energetically, and to remain emotionally stable in these intense times, one simply must have a daily, personal, spiritual practice. See the bigger picture.

Next Post: Part Four, Victory Over Self and Circumstance