Like it or not, life is an emotional experience; but it’s your perceived experience of life that makes it emotional
Are you an emotional reactor or an emotional responder? What’s the difference I hear you ask; it’s called ‘emotional pain’! By now, if you have been keeping up with my blogs and articles, you may have incorporated pro·m·emo into your life, are experiencing no emotional pain and as such have become an emotional responder!
If you are still thinking about the answer and have not incorporated pro·m·emo into your life then you would still be emotionally reactive and experiencing emotional pain.
What does decreased emotional pain feel like? Fantastic! You live a life where you can be free to embrace new ideas and concepts that further improve your life. If you are already processing your emotions with the pro·m·emo elixirs (refer to my last two blogs), then you could consider further enhancing your emotional mastery by using UEFT (Universal Emotional Freedom Technique), performing on a daily basis one of our 409 degrees – just hold it sequences or your receiving FlameTree healing sessions, to further embrace your new life of emotional freedom. Everything I listed above assists you in achieving life mastery, that is, you learn to become an responder to your life; a strong and vital, physically fit individual, who is free from their previous limiting belief symptoms and of course no emotional pain!
The Origin of Emotional Pain
Emotional pain comes from the ‘distance’ between your heart (feelings) and your mind (thoughts); the greater the distance, the greater the emotional pain! This distance is created, by no fault of yours; it’s how we have been conditioned! In our society we are taught that our ‘mind’ is the ‘ruler’ and our ‘heart’ (feelings) is the interference.
You may better relate to this with the following examples:
- Big boys don’t cry!
- Good little girls don’t get angry!
- Real men aren’t afraid!
- And so on…
We have been conditioned to believe and behave in a particular way, which increases the distance between our heart and mind! In our coming up blog, men and emotions, we discussed the challenges that men face when growing up in relation to their emotions. Some of these challenges are shared, for example, boys are often told (and conditioned) when growing up that showing our emotions (such as crying) equates to weakness. It may not be taught as directly as that (although I recall as a boy being called weak for crying like a “little sissy girl” when I fell off my bike!) however, this conditioning is often taught through unconscious parenting, that is, the actions and words used by parents were done without conscious thought, let alone considering the long term ramifications on their child’s emotional health and wellbeing. Again, this is not necessarily the fault of parents, that is, you do not know what you do not know. However, once you do know, and if you then continue the negative stereotyping, then it is back on you!
The reality is that our heart is the ‘seat of our harmony’, not our consciousness (mind – thinking). We are taught from an early age that using our ‘mind’ and trying to ‘think’ our way through life is better then using our heart and following our ‘feelings’ because using your heart only leads to getting hurt (emotional pain).
This belief is reinforced by the following life example. When a child experiences love for the first time and that love goes unrequited, the well-meaning, loving parent may impart some sage-like advice such as “it cant hurt that bad, you are not old enough to know what love is” Like it or not, the first experience of love is the strongest and as we have not yet experienced hurt or emotional pain from love, we put our whole young self in to this experience, not holding any emotion or anything else back. This is probably why and where the saying ‘the first cut is the deepest’ comes from; the emotional pain of our love being unrequited. After this, we learn to be wary of love and falling into it too quickly and we mistakenly believe we have a choice as to whom we love! If, in addition to this emotional pain, the child’s feelings and corresponding emotions were put down by their parents or good meaning friends, they now learn how to avoid the associated mockery they feel alongside the heartache; the overall outcome being emotional pain.
This begins the journey of a lifetime of unconsciously repressing emotions and emotional pain. We then take on the belief of ‘thinking’ rather than ‘feeling’! What we are then left with is a ‘hollow life’ in which we have learnt to at best ‘manage’ our feelings by repressing them. We attempt to control the emotion, to manipulate them or to stuff them down and ignore them! We end up doing anything to avoid feeling the emotional pain of feeling emotions and instead of simply feeling and processing our emotions we end up spending long amounts of time, vast amounts of energy and going to huge efforts to avoid them, believing that if we feel our emotions they will cause even more emotional pain.
What we then fail to realize is that emotions and life are similar to an unfolding rose. As the rose unfolds, it reveals its beauty and allows, via pollination, life to continue. The more we live an emotional life, where we are emotionally responding to life rather than emotionally reacting to it, the more we allow for beauty and vibrancy to shine within our lives. Life is all about our emotions as there is no greater matter than how we feel! Unfortunately, experiences such as our first love failing or other experiences of being mocked for showing an emotion become this lesson which is often discovered as we straddle the divide between hopelessness and guilt at our life being less than fully realised.
When you realise that there is a ‘distance’ between your heart and your mind, this is the time when you should allow yourself to ‘feel’. Paradoxically this is when we manipulate or control our emotions in some way the most, in order to avoid feeling (because we have learned that they will cause us emotional pain). Why would we want to continue not feeling? The answer to this question is ‘hardwired’ within us. We all feel a sense of needing to belong! Said differently, we are prepared to stuff down our own true feelings to fit in so we can feel a sense of belonging. We have an innate desire to ‘fit in’ and because we see everybody else manipulating their emotions, we start to do it too. If we ask for assistance the chances are that we will ask someone who will advise us to repress our emotions because that is all they know, they, like you, have been taught to be emotional reactors to life.
Emotions are a natural part of life. Pain is also a natural part of life. The sooner we stop ‘trying’ to control or manipulate them, and get to ‘feeling’ them, the sooner we achieve emotional mastery and live better lives. What many of us fail to recognize is that emotional pain is a message that a personal boundary has been crossed. When this happens, it is as simple as allowing that message to be heard. If you block the message out, such as ignoring it, taking pills to stop it, drinking alcohol to suppress and so on, you unwittingly increase the emotional pain! Why? Because the message needs to be heard and processed and therefore must become louder and more severe!
Think of emotions as messages that can guide you; it really is that simple. As we stated above, it can be risky to take advice from others during an emotional reaction, because often they feel uncomfortable with having to see you deal with your emotions and they want you to be ‘socially acceptable’ and hence they want you to manage your emotions thereby encouraging you to ignore the emotional pain. There are many reasons for this and often it is because they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions. When someone begins to cry in public, many people walk away. You can literally see their discomfort as the scene unfolds and people don’t like to be uncomfortable. So, as most people will do, they will do whatever it takes to restore that comfort level and that usually results in you stuffing down your emotions. As we have discussed, this never works, for if it did, I would not have written this or created the pro·m·emo elixirs, UEFT, 409 degrees – just hold it or FlameTree: the personal development & healing system and you would not be here now reading this in the hope of finding a solution to your emotional pain!
Managing (repressing, controlling and so on) your emotions equates to being an emotional reactor, which only leaves you feeling worse; more emotional pain!
Emotional mastery, which can be achieved by applying any of my technologies, equates to being an emotional responder, which only leaves you living an optimal life in which you can process any emotion; the minimization (if not the elimination) of emotional pain! Living life from this place leaves you open to the possibility of discovering and being inspired to live your life of purpose!
pro·m·emo allows for you to begin unclogging stuck emotions, assists you to identify your emotions, and to process them to lead to emotional health and wellness.
So yes, we do need emotional pain because it informs us of a particular message but thanks to pro·m·emo we do not need to be stuck in an emotional state of reactivity.