News Link
Click here for
important news
articles and links -
BREAKING NEWS
What is Wrems?
Wrems Principles
About the
Author
Store
Links
|
Lesson 2. Becoming Emotionally Proactive
Before you begin doing WREMS sessions, you must come to understand several concepts regarding emotions and regarding the subconscious mind which is dealt with in the next lesson. These concepts will challenge most of everything you have been taught. Because of this, you may feel very insecure at the beginning of your WREMS work. This is natural. The more WREMS work you do, the more you come to understand that emotions are not magical, mystical altered states that can take control of your psyche like some strange spell cast over you. They can certainly influence you if you allow them to or are susceptible to strong outside influences! Thus, you must be aware of the difference between emotions that belong to you, are generated by your mind and emotions being triggered by … someone with an agenda to sell you something, for example.
Emotions are, like WREMS itself, merely tools that your mind and body use to convey messages to other creatures around you. In this lesson you will learn what trusting yourself means and what emotions really are as contrasted to what our culture, including your parents taught you. You will also un-learn the old stuff and how to put in the new, healthy stuff.
Be assured. The thread of who you really, really are, deep inside yourself, holds. This thread, this trail of breadcrumbs will guide you all the way through your entire WREMS journey. The destiny of who you will become is already there. You are simply taking the necessary steps on the long journey of discovery.
What is an emotion?
An emotion is a feeling and a feeling is a sensation in your mind AND body that acts as a signal to yourself and to other people and creatures around you. Each emotion has a bio-chemical basis. When the chemical is released in your body you feel that particular emotion. For example: the chemical which brings you HAPPINESS/ JOY is an opium-like substance called an endorphin. This chemical is also a natural painkiller. Another example would be adrenaline which produces FEAR/EXCITEMENT.
Sometimes you trigger the chemical to feel a certain way and sometimes the chemical is triggered by an outside source and you react with the feeling. When you have mastery over your emotions, then more and more you trigger the response you want or when an outside source triggers the chemical, you react in a very controlled manner.
Each emotion brings about a behavior or behaviors. Although each emotion has an innate (inborn) behavior response, for example a surge of endorphins makes you smile and relax, human cultures can force a different behavior to cover the emotional response. In Western culture, the relaxed smile indicates friendliness. In Japan, the same smile means: "I am showing how humble I am." FEAR can also produce a kind of smile. This smile shows teeth, even possibly the canine teeth, and it signals something very different. In Western culture it is a signal that you doubt the other person to the point of distrust. In Japan, such a smile is a very strong signal and means, "Stay away from me."
What is the innate signal for FEAR? It does not show up in children until about 18 months old. It is either a frozen body/ face with squinting eyes or a screaming fit with mouth open and canines showing. In other words, freeze or flee. Not as the old adage goes: flee or fight. Humans are a fear-based animal like deer or raccoons or chimps and must be taught to do battle.)
Are we born with all our emotions?
No. We are born with only two emotions intact. ANGER and JOY/ HAPPINESS. The HAPPINESS you will instantly understand because it is caused by a surge of endorphins. The newborn must have a high production of endorphins to overcome the pain of birth and the relative harshness of being outside the womb. Endorphins make the baby relax and sleep.
If you have been a parent, then you recognize ANGER. When the infant needs something he cries, then screams. His little fists clench and he gets very tense. ANGER is triggered by a surge of chemicals called noradrenalin and catecholamine. Both these chemicals are related to our production of histamine which is closely tied in with our immune system, as are endorphins. ANGER makes the baby fight to stay alive, to get what he wants, to make his caretakers come and help him.
At about three to six months old, the baby learns to combine JOY and ANGER into the emotion of LIKE/DISLIKE which can grow to become LOVE/HATE. Let's say you are feeding your baby mashed peas and he doesn't like them. Since he only has JOY or ANGER as an emotion to respond with, he uses ANGER to show displeasure. If you feed him chocolate pudding and he likes it, he will use JOY to show this. The more ANGER, or JOY he shows, the more you know he LOVES or HATES what is happening.
Not until around eighteen months old does the third innate emotion appear. This is SHAME/ GUILT/ EMPATHY. Just recently the chemical basis for this feeling was found. It is phenylethylamine which produces oxytocin which is the chemical that enables moms to breastfeed. When you are putting out oxytocin, you use to send out friendly signals. You feel like you are relating to people around you and you want to nurture.
How can SHAME and GUILT be the same as EMPATHY? Very easy to understand. If you cannot feel something when someone shames you for something you did, then you cannot accept blame and you cannot transfer this feeling to other people. Let's say two-year-old Tommy pulls the cat's tail. Mom shames him, telling him he hurt the kitty. If Tommy reacts with ANGER, he is not learning to accept blame, he is denying it. If he reacts with the appropriate feeling of GUILT, then he feels hurt and ashamed. He won't want to pull the cat's tail again. He appreciates that the kitty hurts just as he would hurt if someone pulled his – imaginary - tail. Sometimes a child is born who does not develop the ability to feel SHAME and GUILT. That is when there can be problems. (If this subject interests you, sign up for the course in Identifying Dangerous Behaviors in Children.)
All other emotions, which we call the higher emotions, evolve from a combination of SHAME /GUILT/ EMPATHY and JOY and ANGER. You can see how this works by looking at the COLOR=EMOTION CHARTS. To give you one example here: FEAR is a higher emotion. You cannot feel the sensation of FEAR unless you understand and appreciate what it means to lose something you care for such as your parent, your life, your possessions.
We'll explain much, much more when we get to the specific identification of emotions and how to use your COLOR CHARTS.
Learning to trust yourself.
Very few of us trust our ability to learn. From the moment we started school, our education system made it very clear that we couldn't be trusted to learn unless we followed the exact steps that someone in authority gave us. Then we had to pass a test to evaluate whether or not we did as we were told. This is a very destructive way to learn. It is sad because we humans, like all sentient creatures, love to learn and we are one of the most gifted of all creatures on Earth. Learning new and creative things is the ability that gives us superior survival advantage and it can be the most destructive of our talents. Suppressing our natural learning ability cuts back our survivability.
As you work with your self to master your emotions, remember that discipline means to be a learner, NOT a mean critic or strict trainer. Trust your self to learn just as a baby trusts. You will learn without trying to learn. You were born learning and imitating. Your self wants to learn. Trust.
Are you ever truly emotionally independent?
No. You can never be independent of the emotional environment around you. It's like the water in the womb. Even the most isolated monk high in the monastery on a distant mountain still has emotional ties to parents, siblings, friends and fellow monks on some other mountain. We live and breathe and swim in an emotion-filled soup. What happens though, as you do more and more WREMS you become less and less reactive to the emotional tools others are using on you and more and more pro-active. In other words, you don't respond to mind games or power plays or whining, moaning and glad-handing. One WREMSer described it as becoming Mr. Spock, only you keep a sense of humor and a big smile.
When was the last time you felt an emotion?
This morning
Yesterday
Last week
Last month
Last year
Which emotion was it?
What caused it?
This is a trick question. Everyone has emotions going on inside all the time. You felt an emotion this morning, probably several. To re-phrase the question:
When was the last time you were AWARE of the emotion you were feeling?
This morning
Last night
Two days ago
Last month
If you think I'm joking about last month? I'm not. Many individuals have so little awareness of emotions that nothing registers until the emotion takes over their conscious mind and then their body and then they're doing something they never intended doing and not knowing why, except they feel overwhelmed by the emotion causing the reaction.
Look around you. Notice that the vast majority of people operate on an emotion to emotion basis and the amount of education or prestige they have doesn't matter a bit. What people say, the words they use, rarely connect with what they're actually feeling inside. Chances are you are no different.
Changing from one pattern of behavior to another, for example: breaking out of relationships that hurt, can be emotionally crucifying. That's just one example. Confronting your boss, no matter how considerate a person the boss is, is another emotional wrencher.
Yet, when we are masters of our emotional selves, such issues are dealt with and appropriately handled and our emotions remain completely intact. When you are emotionally self-sufficient, you will automatically shift to this new paradigm of behaving based on clarity, instead of simply reacting to the emotions of others.
Suppression of Emotions
You're probably not a person who has to be conked on the head very hard with an emotion before you realize you're feeling it. After all, you're doing these lessons and you're already trying to be sensitive to your emotional environment, which means you're already aware of some of the emotional stuff going on inside you and around you.
Which brings up a touchy subject.
How much do you know about emotional stuff?
For example: Would you be angry if I said that chances are, you really aren't very clear about your emotional state?
You very likely reacted by feeling somewhat upset or huffy or rebellious. You might actually be frightened that I challenged you that way.
Would it help if I said that you are not alone in being unclear? If you were raised in an American/ European culture then it is highly unlikely you were taught, or given any instructions at all on how to correctly identify emotions. In fact, you were probably encouraged not to feel (that is, acknowledge you felt) whole chunks of emotions.
If you are a male reader, can you remember how your father or other male authority figure responded when, at six years old, you cried, that is, felt sad or frightened? Were you sternly told that crying was unmanly?
If you are a female reader, can you recall how you were treated at four years old, when you became angry? Were you shamed for being unlady-like?
So, to fit in, you stopped showing those emotions. You stuffed them away or did them in such a way as to disguise them. By disguising I mean you do a more acceptable emotion to cover. Many men, who are scared, show anger instead. In fact, the more threatened and scared a man is, the more in rage he acts. Often, a woman who is angry will do submissive, appeasing behaviors and the angrier she becomes the more depressed she becomes.
Your original emotions didn't disappear. You cannot take away or add more or less emotion. The chemicals that trigger and are triggered by emotions, for example, adrenaline or endorphins, are continually produced by the brain and are in constant flux according to your need in the ongoing situation. An emotion is an emotion.
What you did LEARN to do was:
Suppress the outward signals to an emotion
Hide an emotion by doing another one
Use an emotion to get something
Cling to an emotion because it feels good
Exist in only one or two emotions for safety.
Emotional Blindness
"You've got to be taught
Before it's too late
Before you are six
Or seven or eight
To hate all the people
Your relatives hate. . .
You've got to be carefully taught."
South Pacific by Rogers and Hammerstein
Living with poor awareness of our emotions means we are blind to much of what is happening to ourselves and to other people. If we cannot identify our own feelings and reactions, we are as blind as those fish who live their entire lives in the darkness of caves. And, when we are unable to accurately tell what emotions are influencing us, we are often out of control. Being bonked on the head by rage or love and then exclaiming 'It's not MY fault!' is a common refrain. Being emotionally dependent is sad.
Most of the time we are guessing. Probably we're guessing poorly. This is not good. We should be angry that we cannot choose how we want to feel and we should be determined to improve ourselves. Luckily, unlike those cavefish, our inner eye of emotion does not atrophy and go away. We can revitalize our emotional sensitivity.
Identifying Emotions
You say that emotions are hard to identify and impossible to change? How can such effervescent feelings as joy or guilt or excitement be taught? Do we learn anger?
YES! As pointed out earlier, we humans both LEARN and UNLEARN emotion signals and reactions exactly as and while we learn to speak languages. Like riding a bicycle, your mind and body only have to imitate and practice and the emotional behaviors will seem natural to you.
"But Mom said I lose my temper just like Uncle Harry does when he gets mad." Oh, sure, and you didn't see Mom do those exact emotional signals by the time you were a week old? Mom and Pop reacted to your ANGER or HAPPINESS just like their parents did to them.
Come on, little infant! Getting attention as an infant is everything! You knew how to get Mom's attention. You reflected her behaviors by imitating her and the human and animal creatures around you. You were born imitating. You LEARNED. All babies are born geniuses at imitating and learning. You were no different.
Nor are emotions deep, dark, unfathomable mysteries. You've only been made to feel that way to keep you emotionally helpless. You can feel differently. You can take charge of your emotional self. You only need some clues to unlock what has been made mysterious into something that makes clear sense.
Look at it this way: the ancient Hopi Indian culture encouraged their children to explore their emotional and spiritual existence. In the ancient Hopi language, there are words for twenty-eight different levels of spiritual experience! Some Buddhist meditation skills not only teach a person to identify hundreds of both sensual and extra-sensual experiences, but to be master of them as well.
Why shouldn't you be master of your own emotions?
REALITY IS
ONLY FOR THOSE
WHO LACK IMAGINATION
You see, if you want to learn, the way is right in front of you. Ready to go. After all, emotions are neither added nor subtracted from your self. All you have to do is go in, talk with your subconscious, and find them. With practice, you can become as highly skilled at emotional identification and responding as you are at walking or driving a car or playing basketball or cooking. Best of all, you will respond naturally to the world around you.
Taming an Emotion
Becoming emotionally self-sufficient cannot be achieved by harsh means. It can only be done with trust and love. It is like taming a wild animal.
As you TAME those old, primitive emotions, you develop MASTERY over your emotions. MASTERY is not CONTROL. The lion tamer in the ring does not CONTROL the lion. There is a subtle and very important difference. MASTERY is based on knowledge and love. CONTROL uses dominance and fear. Being a MASTER means you have taken the time to develop inner strengths and TAME your own emotions. Being a MASTER makes you responsible.
© WREMS. All rights reserved. |
