Everyday Enlightenment, page 16
Timelining: Using Your Intuitive Imagination
Projecting your imagination into the future provides an intuitive perspective far deeper than looking only from the temporal viewpoint of the present. It also enables you to apply intuitive wisdom to a decision by anticipating the future consequences of that decision. The process is quite simple and takes only a few minutes, affording you more intuitive data on which to base a decision. (Using the fork-in-the-road metaphor, it allows you to project your imagination up each path, to sense what awaits you.)
Let's say you have to decide between choice A, B, or C:
1. First you assume, for the moment, that you have committed to choice A.
2. Having done so, sit quietly, with your eyes open or closed, take a deep breath, and relax; then ask yourself the following question and see what appears in your mind's eye:
• Having chosen A, what will I look like, feel like, and be doing one hour from now? (Wait and allow your intuitive imagination to create a picture.)
• Having chosen A, what will I look like, feel like, and be doing one day from now? (Again, wait and see.)
• Having chosen A, what will I look like, feel like, and be doing one week from now? (Wait and see.)
• Having chosen A, what will I look like, feel like, and be doing one month from now? (Wait.)
• Having chosen A, what will I look like, feel like, and be doing one year from now? (Wait.)
• Having chosen A, what will I look like, feel like, and be doing ten years from now? (Wait.)
3. Next go through the same list for choices B and C. At the end of this process, which takes only a few minutes, you will have more perspective than before, having accessed your intuitive imagination.
Perhaps you're wondering if you only imagine how you might look and feel and what you may be doing, how do you know it's accurate? What if you merely invent a better scenario because that's the option you really prefer? To answer those questions, consider: Why did your imagination (or subconscious) deliver those specific images and not others? And if you made up a nice scenario because you really prefer one choice over the others, hasn't your decision been made?
Intuition and Faith
Ultimately you put away the tools and methods and go directly to the source of inner guidance—Spirit or God or your higher self whispering within you. Trusting your intuition is really the same as trusting God. Intuition must ultimately rely on faith, because your inner guidance system does not necessarily lead to risk-free decisions. Sometimes your choices may take you where you think you want to go, but on other occasions you may trust your intuition, make a decision, and find the going very tough for a while. That doesn't mean you made the wrong decision.
Conventional truth tells you that you can make mistakes.
Transcendental truth informs you that you cannot ultimately make the wrong decision.
Intuition is not about certainty. It is about trust and faith. Faith is the courage to treat everything that happens as exactly what you need for your highest good and learning.
Sometimes your intuition guides you directly onto a difficult path to test you, temper you, and teach you to deal with difficulties and evolve in the process.
Life won't always give you what you want, but it will consistently give you what you need. It won't always tell you what you want to hear, but it will tell you where you need to go, what you need to do, and whom you can trust. This faith awakens intuition—an expanded way of knowing, seeing, and doing in the world.
THE SEVENTH GATEWAY
Accept Your Emotions
Emotions are like waves on the sea or weather in the skies, rising and passing of their own accord.
You cannot control your feelings by an act of intention or will.
So you are not responsible for your feelings; only for your response to them.
Accept emotions completely, let your feelings be; just don't let them run your life.
The Center of the Cyclone
The key is to not resist or rebel against emotions or to try to get around them by devising all sorts of tricks; but to accept them directly, as they are.
—Takahisa Kora, M.D.
Road Map: Emotional Riddles
In polite society we rarely show strong or spontaneous emotions, almost as if we don't feel them. Yet most of our lives are driven by emotion—seeking pleasant feelings and avoiding unpleasant ones. We pursue whatever we hope will make us feel good. In fact, for many people, the entire quest for enlightenment is a search for permanently pleasurable emotions.
If your life is a journey, then emotions are the natural weather fronts you pass through (and that pass through you) along the way. You will find this metaphor of “emotions as weather” often in this chapter, because emotions and feelings—two words I use interchangeably—do behave much like the weather.
Imagine what your life would be like if you spent much of your time and energy struggling to fix the weather every time it stormed, snowed, or grew windy or hot. Yet most of us attempt to do just that when storms arise inside us. We seek the help of professionals, looking for strategies to fix our feelings. But, as logical as it may seem, seeking to improve our emotional state by working directly on our emotions isn't realistic (or as useful as working on our behavior), as you will see.
Having gained a deeper awareness of the issues of worth, will, energy, money, and mind in the first six gateways, you now stand at the threshold of a fresh, radical, and above all realistic approach to emotions and how to deal with them in everyday life. Accepting your emotions (and the emotions of others) serves to heal and rejuvenate all your relationships, from acquaintances to intimates.
Accept Your Emotions is not a recipe for feeling better or experiencing only positive feelings, but rather a realistic approach that involves accepting your feelings as natural, learning from them, letting them pass through you, then getting on with your life. In this gateway you learn to change your relationship to your feelings. This requires vigilance and an open mind, because you are going to confront unexamined assumptions accepted by most of us almost from birth.
In this gateway you will explore the source and primary causes of emotional difficulties; why feelings are natural; how negative emotions have positive lessons; why therapy aimed at fixing feelings doesn't work; seven ways to influence your moods; acceptance and healing; and, finally, an emotional meditation to rise above the storms.
Those of us who are the least interested in exploring this gateway may benefit from it the most. (This principle also applies to the other gateways.)
The Birth of Emotions
Most children begin life in an emotional Garden of Eden. If you were a normal healthy baby, your natural state, when rested and fed and freshly diapered, was bliss. (For confirmation of this, look into a baby's eyes.) Of course, you also had at times intense (and quite natural) emotional ups and downs. You arrived with instinctive fears and startle reflexes and soon learned frustration and anger, and when you were sad, you let the entire house know about it. Emotions moved through you in waves; you let them flow, then let them go. You felt your emotions intensely and expressed them without inhibition. Then, when your relatively simple needs were met (diapers changed, held and cuddled, fed), you returned once again to your resting state of ignorance and bliss.
As you grew, you left that garden of childhood innocence, and began to anticipate, grow anxious, form expectations and judgments about yourself and the world. I don't need to elaborate on this theme; you are quite aware of your present emotional (or completely nonemotional) state. Still, as in the previous gateways, the following self-assessment brings focus to your relationship with the emotions in your life.
An Emotional Self-Assessment
Everyone, East or West, experiences emotional storms and doldrums. The only real difference is that for some of us the clouds blow over more quickly than for others. When you take the following emotional inventory, note that we are not going to address positive emotions much here, because few of us feel that happiness or joy or excitement is a problem. But let's consider the following questions:
• How do you tend to behave when you feel upset?
• Do you wish your spouse, partner, parents, children, or friends would be less—or more—emotional?
• Would you be described as “an emotional person”? (What does that mean to you?)
• How do you respond when someone around you is critical or negative toward you?
• Are you ever embarrassed by your own or others' emotions?
• Is fear, sorrow, or anger more of a problem for you?
• Do you wish you could feel happier, motivated, or peaceful
more of the time?
• When you feel happy and loving, why can't you hold on to those feelings?
• How long do negative emotions last (when you are angry, fearful, or sad)?
• How long do positive emotions last (when you are excited, inspired, or happy)?
• Do you wait for positive feeling-states (like motivation, inspiration, commitment, or dedication) before doing whatever needs to be done?
These questions set the stage for a new approach to accepting, even welcoming, all kinds of emotions into your life so that you can begin to experience life and Spirit in living color rather than black and white.
The Roots of Feeling
A meteorologist might be able to tell you complex reasons why it rained today, involving the interaction of temperature inversions, the jet stream, and marine air hitting warming mountains. Psychologists, who serve as emotional meteorologists, may offer explanations for your internal weather. But no matter what the reasons, if it's still raining, you need to ride out the storms, accept them as natural, and get on with your life.
There's a story about a man who wrote the Department of Agriculture to complain about the crabgrass spoiling his lawn. The department wrote back with a number of suggestions. He tried all the remedies but could not completely eliminate the crabgrass. Exasperated, he wrote back and said that every suggestion had failed. He received a short note that said, “We suggest you learn to love it.”
of course, we don't love painful feelings like anxiety or depression. We don't have to love or even like them, but we do have to accept them, as difficult as that can seem at times. Emotions, no matter how painful, are not the problem. The problem is dropping out of school or work, putting your family or duties or life on hold until such time as you can work out your emotional issues. Would you rather feel depressed while sitting alone in your room trying to figure it all out or feel depressed while getting your house cleaned or your project completed? (You may still feel depressed, but you have a cleaner house.)
The heart of accepting your emotions (and, as you've seen, of reclaiming your will) is to do what you need to do despite what you are feeling. Accept and learn from your feelings, but don't let them run your life. By remaining productive during difficult emotional episodes, you are more likely to improve your emotional state than if you do nothing but ruminate and wait for sunny skies.
To understand why relaxed acceptance may be the most realistic approach to emotions, let's begin our exploration by examining where emotions come from. This insight doesn't help you control emotions, but it does generate perspective and compassion for yourself and others. So let's look at some common emotion generators. Welcome to Emotional Meteorology 101.
Mind and Meaning: While I was strolling with a friend in Europe, a gang of youths walked past us and one of them gestured toward us. I smiled at what I thought was a friendly gesture and was about to wave, but my friend was angry. Apparently the gesture, which I didn't understand, was considered both rude and obscene. But it had no meaning for me, so it aroused no emotion. Many emotions begin from our mental interpretation of what occurred.
Diet: What you eat and drink affects your moods. Sometimes negative emotional states come not from your heart, but from your intestines. Lightening up your diet, as described in the third gateway, can help to brighten your moods.
Fatigue: Most of us feel more dour or irritable at the end of a long day when we are too tired to deal with a problem—usually the easiest but not the best time to get into an argument. The impact of fatigue on your emotions depends upon whether it stems from stress and burnout or from, for example, completing a good workout or satisfying task.
Intoxication: Anything that produces an intoxicated state may elevate or depress your emotions by reducing inhibitions. If you feel good, you may get happier; sad people get sadder; angry people get ugly.
Hormones: Whether you are male or female, hormones tend to affect your moods and emotions, and like any emotional factor, they tend to, but do not have to, affect your behavior.
Tension/Stress: As in the case of illness or pain, tension or stress may produce stress, reactive emotions, or hypersensitivity.
Illness and Pain: Some chronically moody or temperamental people may be suffering from chronic illness or pain. Few of us are at our best when feeling ill or out of sorts. It takes courage to behave with kindness when in pain.
Circumstances and Environment: Clearly your emotional tone tends to vary depending upon whether you just learned you were accepted to the college of your choice or were laid off from your job. Pleasant circumstances stimulate more expansive emotions than painful ones. Most people arriving in Las Vegas tend to be in better moods than those leaving.
Other Factors: Emotions are affected by anything from astrological transits to biorhythms—and from childhood memories, old associations, even songs or scents from the past.
The point of the preceding list of factors that generate emotions is that you cannot, and need not, analyze or understand all the factors that produce your emotional peaks or valleys. It's enough to know that the interaction of mind and circumstance contributes to your emotional lows and highs. The key question is not where your emotions come from, but what, if anything, shall you do with them?
one way most of us deal with feelings is to ignore them or pretend they don't exist—to deny them. Then, as the pressure builds, we occasionally experience emotional episodes such as arguments or explosions (and we may later berate ourselves for having “lost control”).
The Denial of Feeling
The day you were told that big boys (or girls) don't cry, the first time someone asked you why you were upset, the day you learned that you upset others when you expressed your anger, you began to cut yourself off from accepting (or even recognizing) your own feelings. You learned to intellectualize your emotions and started to analyze, suppress, justify, and deny them. Your exile from the Garden of Emotional Authenticity had begun.
Symptoms of Emotional Denial
Why would any rational person want to get in touch with his or her emotions? Didn't we get past that kind of thing in the sixties and seventies?
Facts of life:
• Emotions will no more be denied than stormclouds.
• You need to accept emotions before you can transcend them.
• Before you can accept your emotions you have to know what you are feeling—to know and appreciate and be able to express that feeling.
• You don't transcend emotions in the way you might imagine.
When we devalue or deny our emotional energies, we pay a physical price. Chronic emotional tension can generate or aggravate symptoms such as headaches, backaches, arthritis, hypertension and high blood pressure, dyspepsia, colitis, aggravating conditions such as ulcers and insomnia, and other psychosomatic ailments. And as we age, tension produced from holding in unexpressed emotions tends to produce physical stiffness, muscle aches and, pains, and reduced flexibility. Movement becomes more painful, so we move less, thereby reducing our range of movement, our range of life. In some elderly people you can see the cumulative effect of denied emotions stored as chronic tension. Such restriction can even create a mental condition called “psychosclerosis”—hardening of the attitudes. Psychologist Wilhelm Reich would remind his clients that unexpected emotions are stored in the flexor muscles of the body, and the organs weep the tears that the eyes refuse to shed.
One of my problems is that
I internalize everything.
I can't express anger;
I grow a tumor instead.
—Woody Allen
Those of us most out of touch with our emotions are usually also out of touch with our bodies. When athletes ignore physical pain, this may have short-term benefits but long-term liabilities. The same is true for tuning out our feelings. When we lose emotional sensitivity we also lose touch with our intuitive capacities. In losing touch with our feelings, we also lose touch with the feelings of others. It can come to the point that we live in a kind of benumbed state, feeling disconnected or dissociated from life. In fact, what some of us have experienced as a spiritual problem (a sense of disconnection from God) is actually an emotional problem (a disconnection from feeling).
A Simple Practice
If you are no longer sure what you feel anymore—whether you are afraid or hurt or angry—the following exercise can help attune your emotional awareness and, in the process, improve your intuitive capacities and empathy in relationships.
• When you think you may be upset but aren't clear about what you feel, ask yourself, “If I felt something right now, would it be closer to fear, sorrow, or anger?”
• You may respond, “I don't know how I feel.” So persist with yourself: “Fine, I don't know what I'm feeling. But if I knew—if I suddenly had an insight, or if the feeling became so strong it was obvious—would it be closer to fear, sorrow, or anger?”
• Then make a statement to yourself or to another. “I feel .” This is a first step toward reintegrating your feelings into your body and your life and opening deeper levels of authenticity.
