99 steps to reclaiming your individuality Step #18

Observing emotions, the alternative perspective:

Understanding our emotional nature is key to a healthy individual makeup. When-ever emotions are discussed or referred to, it is usually in a repairative or subjective manner. We seldom observe our emotional state and more often tend to recover from it. Now by emotions very nature, to effectively control emotion, would in essence be to rob it of its intrinsic value. Certainly one of the most serious flaws in the way we treat symptoms of emotional disorders in today's society, is by attempting to medicate them away. Emotions are a rich and essential part of the human experience. And again, in the pattern of our progress in this course, we seek to observe not alter this rich experience of life.

What we must learn to do is acknowledge them for what they are, and then accept their inherent homogeneity in the totality of our nature(s) plural. When we do this, they no longer have the sense of acting externally on us, but we gain a sense of experiencing the moment through the lens of our emotional natures, which ever one we happen to be experiencing at the time. The caution here is to understand their intrinsic nature, and understand that like everything else in our make-up as individuals, there are polarities, and there are extremes.

We have consistently through this course, so far, always arrived at a point where we are simply asked to observe! Why? Acknowledgement or awareness in any circumstance, in any situation grounds us to the reality that we are being acted upon, and have a choice to approve of this action or behavior, and choose also to alter it, or decline it. Never in any area of our life is this as critical an awareness and practice, as it  is when dealing with the emotional natures. Mastering this skill, if nothing else, will guarantee you a life of total self determination. But also we should stay grounded in the truth  that if it were as easy to control the emotions as deciding what we wanted for dinner or the choice between a hot or cold beverage, our society would not be as rife with emotionally distraught people as it is today, or over the course of history for that matter. Emotions as previously mentioned are an intense part of our conscious awareness as humans. Their omni-faceted natures intersect the complete spectrum of our consciousness, both physically and psychologically. This complexity should not dissuade us from gaining mastery over their control, but simply prepare us for the challenge that will lie ahead.

By simple tools of analysis, evaluation and assessment we can begin to unpack the ominous seeming complexity of the realm of emotions. One well incorporated strategy is the basic 1 - 10 scale.  When we experience emotional stimuli we can start our assessment by attempting to gauge the strength or intensity of those stimuli by rating them on a scale of one to ten What this does, is like in previous exercises, disconnects us from the intensity of the emotion and returns authority to ourselves. Once this is done a few times we will find that the numbers we record will decrease on the scale the more incidences we record. This decrease is not occurring by any increase in tolerance, character or stamina but simply because we are preventing the escalation by mere awareness as previously noted. Secondly and most importantly we should begin to recognize that for example, an angry outburst that we would rate a seven, and a minor grievance we would rate a two, are originating from the same source emotion, and we can if we so choose, effectively control the outcome, and this realization further empowers us, not the emotion, and once this is realized the intensity of the emotion is corralled. Once again, without force without coercion we regain authority and in that authority regain our individuality.