Guest Speaker

How Well Do You Know Your Emotions?



HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW YOUR EMOTIONS?

There are only two basic emotions that we all experience, love and fear. All other emotions are variations of these two emotions. Thoughts and behaviour come from either a place of love, or a place of fear. Anxiety, anger, control, sadness, depression, inadequacy, confusion, hurt, lonely, guilt, shame, these are all fear-based emotions. Emotions such as joy, happiness, caring, trust, compassion, truth, contentment, satisfaction, these are love-based emotions.

There are varying degrees of intensity of both types of emotions, some being mild, others moderate, and others strong in intensity. For example, anger in a mild form can be felt as disgust or dismay, at a moderate level can be felt as offended or exasperated, and at an intense level can be felt as rage or hate. And the emotion that always underpins anger is fear.

PHYSICAL EFFECTS OF EMOTIONS -

Emotions have a direct effect on how our bodies work. Fear-based emotions stimulate the release of one set of chemicals while love-based emotions release a different set of chemicals. If the fear-based emotions are long-term or chronic they damage the chemical systems, the immune system, the endocrine system and every other system in your body. Our immune systems weaken and many serious illnesses set in. This relationship between emotions, thinking, and the body is being called Mind/Body Medicine today.

YOU CANNOT CONTROL YOUR EMOTIONS -
You cannot change or control your emotions. You can learn how manage them, living peacefully with them, transmuting them (which means releasing them), and you can manage them, but you cannot control them.

Think of the people who go along day after day seeming to function normally, and all of a sudden they will explode in anger at something that seems relatively trivial and harmless. That is one sign of someone who is trying to control or repress their emotions but their repressed emotions are leaking out.

The more anyone tries to control their emotions the more they resist control, and the more frightened people eventually become at what is seen to be a “loss of emotional control”. It is a vicious circle.

It’s important today to be politically correct and that means not challenging or disagreeing with what the average person believes. It means not expressing negative emotions in public. Showing emotion in public in North American and European societies represents being “out of control” a great sign of weakness. People feel uncomfortable with those who express strong emotions. We are a society that is taught to hide our emotions, to be ashamed of them or to be afraid of them. Regardless, we are born with them and must live with them. This means learning how to know them, be with them, and release them.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CORE ISSUES AND EMOTIONS

We each come into this lifetime with at least one core issue to resolve. Different situations will continue to present themselves in different but repeat patterns until you have dealt with the core issues in your life.

A few examples of core issue are abandonment / victimization, demanding justice in all matters, living spiritually rather than materially. These are overarching issues that affect emotions completely. Many people find out about their core issues by learning to deal with their emotions. It is a gentle pathway that leads you into a deeper knowing of your core issues.

EMOTIONS AND EMOTIONAL ABUSE

Emotional abuse is a form of violence in relationships. Emotional abuse is just as violent and serious as physical abuse but is often ignored or minimized because physical violence is absent. Emotional Abuse can include any or all of the following elements. It can include rejection of the person or their value or worth. Degrading an individual in any way is emotionally abusive, involving ridiculing, humiliating and insulting behaviour. Terrorizing or isolating a person is deeply abusive and happens to children, adults, and often the elderly. Exploiting someone is abusive. Denying emotional responses to another is deeply abusive. The “silent treatment” is a cruel way of controlling people and situations. Where there is control there is no love, only fear.

If you are living in a situation that is emotionally abusive please seek help from either a professional or one of the many helpful organizations present in most communities, to help you sort out your issues. Emotions stemming from emotional abuse are deep and complex, requiring ongoing help from those trained to deal with emotional abuse.

FEELING YOUR FEELINGS -
People spend much time talking about how they feel. They attend workshops, they visit therapists, and they tell others who did what to them and describe how they feel about it. They talk and talk about their feelings but they don’t feel their feelings. They intellectualize and analyse their feelings without feeling them.
People are afraid to really feel their feelings, afraid of losing control, afraid of the pain involved in feeling their emotions, of feeling the sense of loss or failure or whatever the emotion brings with it. People are afraid to cry. So much of life is about what you feel rather than what you think. Being strongly connected to your emotional life is essential to living a life with high energy and a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction.

HOW WE REPRESS EMOTIONS -
When we have an experience that we find painful or difficult, and are either unable to cope with the pain, or just afraid of it, we often dismiss this emotion and either get busy, exercise more, drink or eat a bit more, or just pretend it has not happened. When we do this we do not feel the emotion and this results in what is called repressed, suppressed or buried emotions. These feelings stay in our muscles, ligaments, stomach, midriff, auras. These emotions remain buried within us until we bring that emotion up and feel the emotion, thus releasing it. Emotions that are buried on the long-term are the emotions that normally cause physical illness.

The following are a few examples of the methods people use to avoid feeling their emotions-

Ignoring your feelings

Pretending something has not happened

Overeating

Eating foods loaded with sugar and fat

Excessive drinking of alcohol

Excessive use of recreational drugs

Using prescription drugs

Exercising compulsively

Any type of compulsive behaviour

Excessive sexual activity with or without a partner

Always keeping busy so you can’t feel

Constant intellectualizing and analysing

Excessive reading or TV

Working Excessively

Keeping conversations superficial

Burying angry emotions under the mask of peace and love

SYMPTOMS OF REPRESSED EMOTIONS -
It takes a lot of energy to keep emotions repressed and buried. If you keep emotions buried for a long period of time, you lower your overall vibrations, and lower vibrations lead to illness and an accelerated ageing process. Buried emotions create fatigue and depression. The following are some major symptoms of buried and repressed emotions -

Fatigue and depression without an apparent cause

Speaking of issues/interests rather than personal matters and feelings

Pretending something does not matter when inside it does matter

Rarely talking about your feelings

Blowing up over minor incidents

Walking around with a knot in your stomach or tightness in your throat

Feeling your anger not at the time something happens but a few days later

In relationships, focusing discussions on children/ money rather than talking about yourselves

Difficulty talking about yourself

Troubled personal relationships with family, friends, acquaintances


A lack of ambition or motivation

Lethargic – who cares - attitude

Difficulty accepting yourself and others

Laughing on the outside while crying on the inside

REPERCUSSIONS OF REPRESSED EMOTIONS -
Repressed or buried emotions can cause major difficulties in the physical body and energetic systems. They affect all your relationships, and they especially affect your ability to grow spiritually and shift your level of consciousness.
Emotions repressed for the long-term can cause serious illness including cancer, arthritis, chronic fatigue, and many other major health problems. Since repressed emotions can rest either in your body or auras, they can cause holes in your auras, through which your energy leaks out creating fatigue, a sense of vulnerability, and low self-confidence
When you have repressed emotions, your behaviour and reactions to events in the present moment are really reactions to past events as well as the present. This has a negative effect on all relationships in your life. You cannot be fully present with those you love in today until you have released your emotions from the past. You buried emotions because they were too painful and difficult to deal with when they occurred and your reactions to today’s events are affected by this pain and hurt that remains buried in your body.
It takes a lot of energy to bury emotions and to keep them buried. There isn’t much energy left over for other activities when your energy is being used to keep stuffing these emotions back down. By nature, buried emotions want to come up so you can become aware of them, feel them and release them. You work very hard to keep them stuffed down.

Our real purpose in being on Mother Earth is to keep increasing our level of consciousness and living a more spiritual or love-based life. The higher the consciousness someone has, the higher degree of spirituality in his or her life. The higher the spirituality the closer we are to being what we are meant to be, a fully integrated and loving human being. You cannot shift to higher levels of consciousness as long as you have major negative emotions buried within you.

COMMITTING TO EMOTIONAL HEALTH
People who make a deep commitment to themselves to become emotionally healthy are willing to go to great lengths to learn about their emotional selves and to do what is required to release buried emotions. This is often an uncomfortable and difficult journey when you begin, but I promise you great joy once you’ve gotten over the first few hurdles. Once you make this commitment your journey to identify your issues and release buried emotions will become much easier.

METHODS TO IDENTIFY YOUR EMOTIONS -
Emotions are reliable indicators of what is really going on inside of us. There are many ways to identify emotions and you will have to choose the manner that is most suitable to your personality. Some people need to do this in solitude whereas others need to do this with others. Some will want to write while others will use a much more casual approach. Sometimes it’s best to combine a number of approaches for a deeper identification of emotions.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope you have benefitted greatly and feel more aware of the effects of just how much our emotions create either chaos or contentment. It really is important to take responsibility for how you really feel.

In light

Eve the Empath ??


We cannot deal with any individual health issues or discuss them within readings . This article is focussed on dealing wth emotions, however as Eve stated:  If you are living in a situation that is emotionally abusive please seek help from either a professional or one of the many helpful organizations present in most communities, to help you sort out your issues. Emotions stemming from emotional abuse are deep and complex, requiring ongoing help from those trained to deal with emotional  issues or abuse.

Helpliine numbers can be found here:

https://www.asktheanswer.com/help

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