A few months ago, I wrote about how emotions should be viewed as data which are meant to be decoded.
Emotions respond to stimuli and in turn generate feelings which cause us to act on the stimuli or not.
One of my most important takeaways from The Art of Empathy by Karla McLaren, M.Ed, was that emotions come in three core forms – the soft state, the mood state, and the intense state.
In the soft state, all emotions can be beneficial. Anger helps you maintain your sense of self, fear helps you orient to change, anxiety helps you to organize and plan, sadness helps you to let go of something that is not working.
The mood state is an elevated form of the emotion which results in a prolonged association with that emotional feeling. Similarly, the intense state is when that emotion becomes so overwhelming that it clouds out almost everything else happening in your mental energetic body.
An example of this is when a breakup or loss of a loved one is so fresh that it results in extreme, intense, and prolonged feelings associated with that emotion.
When the emotion spends too much time in the mood or intense states, it can cloud your judgment, lead to emotional reactions, and cause you to spiral into thought loops.
Pictographically, imagine your life and the emotions you experience as a sine wave. You have feelings and moments of incredible exuberance like getting married, buying a new car, moving into your dream house, or going on an epic vacation. Those are the peaks of the sine wave.
You also have emotions and feelings of more difficult times which are the troughs of the wave. These include things like losing a loved one, getting let go from a job, and handling intense amounts of stress or physical health concerns.
Inner peace comes from the emotional mastery of not being swayed as intensely by the really high highs or really low lows. In doing so, it cuts out the extremes of either end of the emotional spectrum – as the Buddha called it – The Middle Way.
It allows you to feel the emotion in the soft and mood states, and in turn allows you to live your life in the middle band of presence and relatively stable inner calmness.
It’s not asking you to be an emotionless robot, but rather use your own competence mastery of self-awareness to live a joyful inner life without being pushed or pulled by the incessant sway of the world around you.
One way to build this level of emotional mastery is to release what I call The Big 4.
The Big 4 are:
- Judgments of Others
- Expectations
- Material Attachments
- Material Desires
It doesn’t happen overnight. I’ve been practicing letting go of these four on a near daily basis and am still not fully there yet. But wow, can I tell you some of the shifts that have taken place in my life as a result…
calmer, happier, & more peaceful
more open hearted and compassionate
more trusting of life’s flow
greater synchronicity and presence
less emotionally swayed by seemingly difficult circumstances
filled with gratitude for all I have in life and the opportunities afforded to me with each new day
less occupied with the shiny objects outside of me and more focused on the shiny light inside of me
Try it for yourself and see what shifts.
You can also learn more about all of these things and more in my upcoming book, Banking on Angels!
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