The Truth about Emotional Mastery
“Man's character is his fate.”
When attempting to understand the concrete principles of a self directed, self sovereign, and self led life we discover that we must begin to study human psychology and much of it’s intricacies. Attempting to understand the complexities of the human mind and psychological motivations that are both conscious and unconscious we quickly find that very little of it is rational or logical in nature. What we discover is that human emotion is at the drivers seat of virtually all of the psychological twists and turns people go through and largely is how we make the majority of our life decisions. People often like to assume that the choices and decisions they make are primarily, if not entirely, rationally selected and logically acted upon, yet what we find is that people make decisions based on emotion and as quickly as possible rationalize their decision to appease their emotions. There is nothing really wrong about using our emotions to guide our choices, this after all, is entirely natural and an organic process based on human nature. The problem arises in people’s lives because they are unnaturally disassociated from their intuition and higher reasoning capabilities and the choices they are making are, in actuality, being driven by a deep sense of emotional avoidance techniques or psycho-emotional self sabotage mechanisms.
What drives and determines the choices and actions we take is due to our strongest desire in any given situation. Do our thoughts drive desire or does our emotions? Does logic drive romantic or sexual encounters or is it a type of raw passion? Desire is the strongest force in the human condition and our desire is often times manipulated by our unconscious need to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Search out safety and comfort and run away from uncertainty and discomfort. If you began to monitor your daily behavior and really take an objective look at the choices your making you may come to find most of your decisions are based on short term gratification or comfort at the expense of long term fulfillment and achievement.
In society we have been taught and trained to develop our intellectual faculties to the point of over developing this attribute and under developing our emotional faculties. In this case our society has prioritized the IQ of the individual and has seemed to forget almost completely about something far more important which is someone’s EQ (emotional intelligence). The reason psychology by itself is not enough and will always end up in mere concepts of philosophy in of itself is because true transformation does not occur in the mind alone, it takes place within the body and that is where our greatest intelligence exists. Consider the scientific reality of psycho(mind)-somatic(body) conditions of disease that are largely, if not entirely, caused by various forms of psychological stress/disharmony that propagates in the mind and manifests within the body. This would assume that our thoughts alone are responsible for the outcomes or end products of our material world including our physical state of health and wellbeing. That is only a partial truth because our thoughts can be entirely neutral based on the interpretation or meaning those thoughts have to us and the kind of chemical reaction they can elicit within us. What carries the energy of stress or healing in the body is an emotional force and depending on our emotional development as well as psycho-spiritual development we can better direct this force for our benefit instead of our detriment.
This phenomenon is explained as the mind - body connection and what bridges the mind to the body is our emotion based chemistry. When we experience and reinforce a powerful emotional stimulus a flood wave of chemistry pools through the body and our body begins to entrain itself in direct response to those emotions whether they are stress inducing or stress relieving. When our body experiences a flood of stress based chemicals it begins to slip into what is known as a sympathetic state and if repeated long enough it will go into a sympathetic overload. In order to contend with this the body must create buffers to mitigate the damaging effects of the stress. Once these buffer systems begin to fail we will immediately experience physical symptoms in the form of degeneration and disease of all kinds. To further articulate this point from a biological level we can look at how the immune system acts and responds to the overburden of undue stress. Our immune system is the governing agency of our body which protects us from foreign organisms that would otherwise lead to infections and disease. When we are constantly in an elevated state of emotional distress (survival state) our immune system begins to shut down and the blood supply of the body begins to pool itself into the immediate reactive extremities of the body such as muscle tissue due to the survival based ancestral software left over in our genetics from our ancestors. The message that the body receives is that it is under constant threat and therefore the priority of the immune system is lowered and our body goes into a reactive flight, flight, or freeze state because it believes it is in a life or death situation. If you were being chased down by a wild animal, getting into a car accident, or being mugged on the street the necessity of your innate immune system is irrelevant at that moment and all of your bodies resources will be recruited to protect itself which is exactly what is happening, in varying degrees, for those who have overdeveloped their intellectual capacities but are underdeveloped emotionally and their emotions begin to betray them in conscious and unconscious ways.
“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
Our emotions have a tremendous teaching and are always attempting to make the unconscious conscious by attempting to get our conscious attention in the moment. Consider this concept as an emotional immune system where the emotions we experience are there to help us and inform of us an underlining issue that has been existing underneath the surface and requires our attention. All emotions are valid and deserve their place in our human experience. For example, the emotion of anger has historically been maligned in societies as a detrimental and destructive energy but that is a very simplistic and limited point of view. Anger as an emotion has never caused any problems on the earth at all nor has avoiding anger ever solved any problems. It is the repression and misdirection of anger and other emotional states that has led to the problems we experience in our lives and the macrocosmic challenges we see in the world at large. Just as the body has a built in system for processing emotions through out the neuron-circuitry of the nervous system and neuro-muscular system the planet has a similar built in processing system within itself. It should not be mistakenly interpreted that when I talk about the psycho-somatic effects of our thoughts and emotions on the body that I am someone saying the temporal emotions of anger, fear, rage, shame, sorrow, or any other emotion is necessary detrimental to our physical health and wellbeing. It is when these emotions become locked up like a closed vault and crystalized into our bodily tissues that we begin the descent towards disease and accelerate the biological aging process.
Our emotions, every single one of them, is a carrier wave of encoded information to teach us about ourselves. The challenge of the modern era and likely every era that has ever preceded this one is that we avoid ourselves at every turn, therefore we, collectively speaking, tend to suppress the information attempting to emerge from deep inside because it arises in deeply uncomfortable and sometimes disturbing ways. When we experience troubling emotions that create a sense of uncertainty it can cause us to question ourselves or at least the self that we had become accustomed to being and therefore put the life we had become accustomed to living in question. Unfortunately, avoiding and masking our emotions does little to no good and only results in a deeper sense of existential confusion which leads to further tension, stress, and disharmony in our immediate lives. It is better yet to begin becoming better aquatinted with our emotions and the messages they are have for us. Each emotion that arises has a piece of wisdom to bestow upon our conscious mind and by practicing the art of self acceptance we can receive the wisdom as a form of guidance in order to heal our wounds and transform our lives.
“Unless you learn to face your own shadow, you will continue to see them in others because the world outside of you is only a reflection of the world within you.”
Anonymous
