"There are only two emotions, love and fear." "Choose who ye shall serve." A Course In Miracles
In a previous chapter I discussed how our attitudes create our feelings and emotions If we think with the ego’s mind, we create fear based feelings and emotions. If we think with the spiritual attitude we create love based feelings and emotions. You have the ability to choose the way you feel because your thoughts and attitudes cause your feelings and emotions.
I have developed a six step process to help focalize this process more clearly. This process will be especially helpful when you get your buttons pushed in a relationship or circumstance in life and you are having difficulty figuring out the reason.
Six Step Process For Spiritualizing Your Emotional Self
Step 1:
Write down either the incident or exact behavior of the other person with whom you were dealing. For example, maybe the incident was a traffic jam on the freeway, or your mate became angry with you. The first step is just to write down objectively what happened outwardly.
Step 2:
Write down objectively your response to either the incident or the other person. For example, your response to the traffic jam might have been impatience and aggravation. Your response to your mate might have been defensiveness and anger. Step two is just to write down objectively how you responded, be it appropriately or inappropriately.
Step 3:
This is the key step. Choose to look at the incident or other person’s behavior as being your master teacher, teaching you a lesson that you need to learn. Imagine that the incident or person is an instrument that God is using through which to teach you a lesson and give you an opportunity to grow spiritually. Your negative response always stems from the fact that you are not looking at the situation as a teaching, lesson, challenge and opportunity to grow. The traffic jam is your master teacher. Your mate’s anger is your master teacher.
Step 4:
Make a list of all the psychological and spiritual qualities that you are being given the opportunity to learn. The first thing you are being taught with people is an example of "how not to be" (as in mate’s bad example). This is a good lesson, for you. Some people set good examples and some set bad examples. You can learn from both. You know how it feels to be on the other end of someone’s getting angry and attacking you, so that teaches you not to be that way. This is usually the first lesson we are being taught. In the example of the traffic jam you are being taught patience; preference rather than attachment; to look at things as lessons; surrender, and so on.
In the example with your mate you are being taught to:
- Stay centered
- To own your own personal power
- To have your bubble of protection up so his/her top dog response slides off your bubble like water off a duck’s back
- To be the cause of your own emotions and not let your mate cause your emotions
- Not to let your mate put you into the underdog
- To communicate with your mate in a powerful, loving way instead of a defensive, attacking way
- To discuss instead of argue
- To respond instead of react; to be a master instead of a victim
- To stand up for yourself
- To make a good choice about when to talk or when to be silent
Forgiveness; unconditional love; preference, non attachment to look at things as lessons - Invulnerability
- Transcendence of ego
- To seek love and worth in yourself and from God first, and not seek it first from your mate
- Patience; to set a better example
- To refrain from catching the psychological disease of your mate and to be the healer instead of becoming a patient
- To be spiritual instead of egotistical
- Detachment
- Objectivity
To maintain the right relationship to self and relationship to God are the two most important relationships in your life, even before your mate.
I highly recommend that you use this list of qualities in examining future lessons. So many of the lessons we learn are really the same ones in that list, repeated over and over again.
Step 5:
After listing all the wonderful lessons and golden nuggets of wisdom you have learned, then bless or thank the other person in your mind (or in person) for giving you the opportunity to learn these lessons. Make a firm resolution that, when you are tested in the following day, week or month, you are going to be mentally strong and prepared to respond appropriately. Please do realize that you will be tested again, either with the same person or incident or with a new person and new incident, but it will be a similar lesson.
Step 6:
Remember that if you truly learn from this experience you will never have to experience those negative feelings or victimization ever again, from that person or incident or any similar one.
Use the six-step process for mastering your emotions any time you get into a sticky emotional situation. By using this process and doing it on paper, it will help you see more clearly what is happening.
Catharsis And Identification With Negative Emotions
The above mentioned six step process for mastering emotions and our previous discussion of attitudinal healing can be commonly referred to as masculine, yang, or disidentification methods for dealing with one’s feeling and emotions. This is the opposite of the feminine, yin, identification method.
From a spiritual perspective is there ever a time to identify with and release and express negative feelings and emotions? Certainly we want to identify with our spiritualized feelings and emotions of love and joy and happiness on a continual basis. As for negative feelings and emotions, I believe that there is an appropriate time to identify with and express them under the following controlled circumstances:
1. Dealing with our feelings and emotions can often be compared with the potential we have to walk on water. Even though we know we have no limits, putting this into practice is a different story. The same thing goes for feelings. We know what the ideal way to think is, but putting this into practice in all relationships and in all areas of our life takes a lot of work, just as getting one’s physical body fit and cleared of toxins takes enormous work and self-discipline.
Especially during crisis periods of our life, we are all at times going to have a lot of fear based egotistical emotions arise. What do we do with all these feelings? The first thing to do is try to heal yourself attitudinally, as mentioned in the six steps to mastering your emotions. This will definitely help.
What happens if you can’t see the forest through the trees and a lot of negative emotions are still coming up? You have two choices: You can push them down or you can allow yourself to identify with them and express them. The first alternative is sometimes extremely important to use.
Sometimes you are, for instance, at work or at the grocery store or bank and it is just not appropriate to burst out crying or screaming. This is a time to own your own power, show self control and put your emotions on the shelf, temporarily, until a more appropriate moment to deal with them.
The second alternative is, when you get to your home, car or other safe place, allow yourself to have a catharsis. In other words, express what you are feeling, good or bad. Sometimes we are just overwhelmed and are just not on top of things mentally or attitudinally, and we definitely need to allow ourselves this kind of release.
From a spiritual perspective it is important to find an appropriate time and place and not to hurt yourself or other people in the process, if possible. For example, let’s say you are feeling a lot of anger and you just need to get it out. Instead of going and letting it out on your children or your co workers or destroying your mate, you might scream in the car or take a bat and smash the pillow on your bed, or hit a punching bag, or something of this nature.
Having a good catharsis will allow you to release and let go of a lot of the negative feelings and emotions. Having a catharsis will also bring transformation, insight and understanding.
The best thing to do after your catharsis, when you are rested, is to go to your journal and do some attitudinal healing on yourself. By having the catharsis the dark cloud will have been released or the boil will have been popped.
You will be much clearer at this point to do some good attitudinal reprogramming on yourself. This would be a good time to get some insight and understanding from your journal writing.
2. The second yin or identification method for dealing with negative emotions is to set a timer and give yourself an allotted period of time really to indulge. For example, maybe you are really feeling sorry for yourself. You can’t seem to break it attitudinally with disidentification and more masculine methods. So give yourself thirty minutes on the timer to wallow in self pity. Go for it scream, cry, get into a rage and really over indulge. Get it all out!
RSS 2.0