Emotions

“Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.”
- Roger Ebert

Our emotions are extremely powerful feedback mechanisms, yet most of us choose not to try and understand them and listen to what they are telling us. Believe it or not, our emotions can actually cause us harm and eventually kill us, we will always blame it on some form of disease, (dis-ease), but that's just the easy way out, trying to blame something else, which is far easier than taking responsibility.

What are emotions really? Most people seem to think our emotions have something to do with our heart, mainly because of the feeling a lot of us experience in our chest area during times of intense emotion. But our emotions are actually controlled by 2 glands in our brain, the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland. So, our thoughts controls our emotions and we control our thoughts. Well, most of us do, the rest of us believe we are slaves to our emotions and that life is just mean to us.

So how do we learn to control our emotions? It has taken me years and plenty of reading but I have finally found something that works for me, maybe it will work for you. Below is something called 'The Emotional Guidance Scale' from the book Ask and it is Given by Esther & Jerry Hicks.

1. Joy/Appreciation/Empowered/Freedom/Love
2. Passion
3. Enthusiasm/Eagerness/Happiness
4. Positive Expectation/Belief
5. Optimism
6. Hopefulness
7. Contentment
8. Boredom
9. Pessimism
10. Frustration/Irritation/Impatience
11. Overwhelmed
12. Disappointment
13. Doubt
14. Worry
15. Blame
16. Discouragement
17. Anger
18. Revenge
19. Hatred/Rage
20. Jealousy
21. Insecurity/Guilt/Unworthiness
22. Fear/Grief/Depression/Despair/Powerlessness

The goal is to try and spend as much time as your can in emotion no. 1, but it's not always easy. The biggest mistake people make it to try and go from anger straight to happiness, possible, but not the wisest method. I would recommend going from anger to frustration to hopefulness then to happiness and up to no. 1. Climb the emotional ladder so to speak.

How do you do that? Firstly you need to recognize that you are angry, admit it to yourself, write down why you are angry, it always helps. I can't tell you the number of times I have started writing a letter to my wife and then gone back and read it and realized it'd not such a big deal and the writing helps me get the frustration out of the way. Then just start changing your thoughts, think of your hopes and dreams, think of past memories that have made you laugh, think of the people you love, things you love doing, things you are grateful for. etc.

“The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them.”
- P. D. Ouspensky

It really baffles me how many people are unhappy, and how many people talk about negative things most of the time, I suppose it makes them feel better knowing they are not alone in their misery. Anyway, I hope that what I am sharing with you today helps, if it helps just one person I'll be the happiest person on the planet.

“Negative emotion is your indication from your Inner Being that the action you are considering is not in harmony with your greater intentions.”
– Abraham-Hicks