Emotions are our Allies

Mar 28, 2023

When I was in college, Star Trek: Next Generation was out. I loved the concept of Data, a humanistic android with no emotions though he strove to understand them. Boy were there times when I wished I had no emotions! See, emotional awareness was not something I grew up with, at all – something I’d wager was pretty much the norm for most everyone… everywhere. There are very few ‘civilized’ societies where emotional awareness is valued. Indeed, I was emotionally UNaware of myself and those around me until relatively recently. Ironically, I was also shoulder deep in all kinds of esoteric groups and the consciousness movement in general, and still the idea of emotional awareness just kind of flowed right over my head. I even know that some mystery schools were so devoted to this that they would refuse to work with people who did not have a therapist available to help them with the turmoil that would likely result from starting the real work. Nope, even that went right over my head. I mean, I read the words of course, but I didn’t really understand. In hindsight I can see that I was actively shying away from the topic. After all, I wanted to be CONSCIOUS, not AWARE. My husband was working with someone using the metaphor of Luke Skywalker’s Cave, in which he walked into the darkness and faced himself and this mentee refused, saying they didn’t join the community to be aware of themselves – they joined it to feel good about themselves. While I respect that honesty, it’s also an extremely common sentiment among the spiritual community.

The Story

It was during my husband’s deep dive into emotional awareness (like Skywalker’s Cave analogy mentioned) that I ended up drinking that particular Kool-Aid. Now, after having gone through it all, I’m immensely glad that I did. I talked a bit about this Emotional Blender period in my last episode, so you know it was a prolonged and bewildering period which had more than one component. I got lost in an internal emotional maelstrom, which opened the door to getting thrown face first into the Hall of Mirrors. Remember just earlier when I said that I was radically emotional UNaware? Well, those emotions are still right there, waiting. Just because I wasn’t aware of them did not at all mean that I didn’t have them. I only thought I didn’t have them. Now I’m a huge sci-fi fan, so when I found Nalini Singh’s BRILLIANT Psy-Changeling romance series, I immediately identified with the cold ’emotionless’ Psy race, a race which has been conditioned to ignore and fail to recognize emotional states – but we learn quickly as the series goes on that this failure does not negate the presence or impact of those emotional states. Instead, they just go underground, acting out in ways that the conscious ego-self doesn’t recognize. Her series explores this brilliantly and, bearing in mind it’s a romance series, I would recommend them as a fun research project.

I can’t even point to one particular thing which opened my own floodgates. I think it was being surrounded by people who were on a sincere journey of emotional self-discovery that chipped at my own walls until they eventually just crumbled. So here I fell full body into my repressed emotions and was immediately swallowed whole. I thank all the powers that be for the people around me who not only understood what was going on but made sure that I didn’t completely drown. Without them, I’m pretty sure I would have. Make note of that for your own life – opening a can worms can turn into opening one of those practical joke cans with the ‘springy snakes’ inside that fly out the moment the pressure is released. Now I understand extremely viscerally why many deep-work esoteric practices demand their beginners have a therapist! If you think maybe this might be you, exercise your own discernment and act accordingly! I am not a therapist in any way shape or form. I’m just sharing what I’ve learned and what’s worked for me, not advising you do anything specific.

So how did I get through that mess? One part of me was dealing with the Hall of Mirrors aspect, and I discussed how learning discernment helped me navigate my way through an uncertain identity back to solid ground. But discernment by itself wasn’t going to help me work my way through a lifetime of ignored and repressed emotions. That required a different set of skills that the people in my life helped me cultivate.

The first thing I had to do was honor and accept my emotions – which at the time was quite terrifying, until I came to understand that they aren’t there to torture me. My emotions are not the enemy – just the opposite, in fact. Their job is to help me, though being cognizant of just how they want to do so is up to me to figure out because emotions don’t come from the surface. They come from the core, and if I’m not aware of what’s in the core of me then understanding the emotions themselves is more challenging. At this time, I read Debbie Ford’s “Dark Side of the Light Chasers” (future link) and she had an exercise just for my situation. Her version was to imagine getting onto a city bus full of people. Each person was an emotion – anger, joy, etc. The exercise was to interview them and give them a voice. A friend took that exercise and turned the people into animals. I took that exercise and wrote a story for each of the emotions, letting them vent themselves through words on the page. Every character was an emotion or an archetype, and the landscape was my internal world. It was through this process that I began to truly understand that my emotions are an ally. Not only that, they are the greatest ally I could ever hope for!

The Point

See, emotions are the fuel which moves us through life – not our mind. Our emotions are where the power lies! Emotions make us loyal, tenacious, determined, motivated, grateful, excited, loving. They also make us hate, violent, afraid, despondent, defeated. They are the outward expression of the stories we’ve told ourselves when combined with our perspective of the situation. That part isn’t really seen though, and I’ll go into depth on this in another episode (future link). What is seen is that emotion drives all of the beauty and all of the ugly that humanity is capable of. If we pretend they don’t exist, it changes nothing but instead ensures that all the ugliness expresses itself through underhanded and sneaky ways while we the ego-self can pretend that all is well.

So what is the purpose of the ‘ugly’ emotions – the ones that we’ve been trained to fear, avoid, deny, ignore? Usually, it’s protection from something. For example, the very act of being trained to ignore the ugly emotions is a cultural attempt to protect us from being seen as “bad”, which might endanger our place within the tribe. Historically speaking, endangering that position was life threatening! Another example would be men being trained to ignore and deny their softer emotions, the open expression of which might make them appear vulnerable. In a violent and harsh world, vulnerability is potentially extremely dangerous. Do you see what I mean? Can you think of reasons why some other emotions would repressed or denied?

Another HUGE revelation? Anger is a mask most often worn by fear. For every bit of anger that I feel, I’ve learned to look under the hood so to speak. What am I afraid of that is triggering an aggressively defensive reaction? Sit with that one. It’s life changing!

Ultimately, I broke my perception of emotions into two broad categories: expansive and contractive. Expansive emotions seek to build, grow, connect, and expand the potential I can activate. The contractive emotions have another goal – to separate, defend, shut down, and contract potentials. Understand that this is more of a situational aspect than an absolute – sometimes anger can motivate expansive actions as much as it can motivate contractive actions. Regardless of what the emotion is, I try to take the time – where I can – to evaluate things before action is taken. Did you notice the way I worded this? Emotions are upwellings from our core self, attempting to inform the waking mind and attempting to inspire action. Emotions themselves are just messengers – not the acting agent. Ideally, I want my waking self to be the one to decide what actions I take, not a reflexive subconscious action. By now, I’ve gotten pretty good at being able to feel is the actions that the emotions are trying to inspire are expansive or contractive in nature. That’s a practice thing though, just as feeling empowerment or disempowerment is.

My personal goal is to the promote the expansive manifestation of emotions as often as I can, while recognizing that the contractive emotions are also trying to help me. I can work with the contractive ones to understand the story behind the emotion, then I can re-frame the story and thus change the emotion (future link). While I initially connected with emotions through a written story, now I can have an active dialogue such as when I’m driving. When I can ask “What about this situation makes me feel X?” and then X emotion replies “Because…”, that is when I know I have a working relationship with my emotions. They don’t have scream at me anymore to hear them, to honor them. Now, they can whisper to me and know they will be heard. Remember what I said in a previous episode?  Listen to the whispers, so you don’t have to hear the screaming.

When you have the courage to face your emotions in the spirit of cooperation, recognizing that they are the fuel which we can use to propel us through our lives, then I applaud you for taking a massive step up your journey to expressing all of the potential you have. It’s not easy, not by a long shot. And I for one know that quite often I fail in the ideal scenario, but I keep trying and, like a Dark Night, every failure means I’ve learned a little bit more so that the next time I can catch things faster, respond more intentionally, and further aim to expand myself as well as expand as many of those around me as I can.

TL:DR

Emotions are the fuel for actions taken. Not being aware of what’s going on “under the hood” means this fuel can push us in directions we might not want to go. When we work to understand our emotions and make them our ally, we can turn this powerhouse into something intentional.

About the Image

This was perhaps one of the largest garden spider webs I have encountered. The back corner of our yard has this massive tree and we had the surrounding landscape run wild. This big spider was quite well fed! I selected this image because spiders are so beneficial to the environment, especially for us gardeners, by eating all kinds of insects. Of all the images I got for this spider and her web, I chose one in which the spider itself was out of focus. Why? Speaking for myself, when I started this journey I didn’t really see my emotional self – it was out of focus because I was looking at the bigger more obvious things. Like many of us, when that scary thing first comes into focus my initial reaction was to swat them away – but they serve an important role and I had to learn that.

Audio

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Video

Video is also available through the YouTube Channel. The background are the spring daffodils at the base of a plum tree in my yard which are gently swaying in the breeze.