Exploring the Emotional Jungle
“If you don’t think your anxiety, depression, sadness and stress impact your physical health, think again. All of these emotions trigger chemical reactions in your body, which can lead to inflammation and a weakened immune system. Learn how to cope, sweet friend. There will always be dark days.”
One of the things I've learned about working with emotions is that they exist in a complex, ever-changing ecosystem, and interrelate with many elements of the self and dimensions of one's outer environment. This may seem to be a fairly obvious statement, but I find the degree of complexity of these interactions to be well beyond what most people have had occasion to deeply consider and fully realize. In a culture that tends to sweep emotional experiences under the rug as unimportant and even sometimes shameful, we are not taught how to value the emotional realm and healthfully integrate it into our daily experiences. Beginning to do a better job of this requires that we respect the complexity and the mysterious non-logic that governs emotions, as well as become open to adventures of a new an unfamiliar kind as we learn to effectively navigate this jungle.
In the subconscious, where the vast majority of resistance to change and progress originates, the coin of the realm is emotion; the subconscious speaks in symbol and color, in the way our bodies feel, and in the way our emotions mysteriously interact with all of this. A truth that can be maddening to the logical mind and the ego is that it takes openness to a more feminine-energy process than the analytical mind can comprehend to make progress in these shiftings sands. We're all familiar with the concepts of structured goals and linear processes to get to them, because these are all we've been offered. In fact, we've been so entrained by millennia of masculine-energy, logical-mind-and-discipline glorification that we think to enter the mysterious waters of the subconscious and to let a helpful process evolve organically (which, for some goals, is absolutely the most useful process) is folly, weakness, wishful thinking of the most ridiculous kind. After all, this period of history has given us some excellent understanding about how to use logic and discipline effectively, and there are many great success stories that have resulted from these methods. And yet, when you invest some time in getting to know the vicissitudes of your emotions, you find that there are actually discernible patterns that can guide your journey through them into greater wisdom and effectiveness on a whole different level than can be accomplished only with the accoutrements of the conscious mind.
No matter how much you "understand" where your resistance comes from, as my partner Andrew likes to say, "the mind is not the right tool for every job." You can't "think" yourself out of the physical and emotional effects of trauma, for instance. No amount of pure logic will dislodge entrenched emotional patterns that you learned before you were old enough to notice what was happening. This is what cellular biologist Candice Pert was getting at when she said, "The body is the subconscious mind." Bruce Lipton, another cellular biologist, writes about how the subconscious mind is like a tape recorder. Yelling at the recording won't accomplish anything. If you want to change the recording, you have to overwrite it, and that can happen only at the level of the subconscious mind, which is very much connected to the physical body.
To make things more confusing, though, emotions can be influenced by thoughts, experiences, and words we've encountered at any point in our lives, whether or not they were even ours. When we're children, we pick up a great deal of our learning through observation, and we don't yet have the awareness and intellect to discard the rubbish that gets thrown into our paths. The untold number of chemical reactions and communications going on in the physical body at any given moment influence emotion in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, some of which we can influence with factors like food and exercise. Our emotional habits draw us in certain directions. What's going on around us, including the macro of world events all the way down to the micro of how those closest to us are feeling, influences us. How energy is moving through our body's meridians affects emotion. All of these together form the basis of interactions so complex as to be nearly inscrutable. It can seem as though our emotions behave like wave forms as random as crashing surf on an uneven coastline.
If you want to master the art of working with your emotions, as with any worthwhile goal, it does take some time and commitment. It also takes familiarity with tools designed for this purpose. There's a lot of great information out there on ideas for accepting and working with this essential part of yourself, and I encourage you to seek methods that appeal to and work well for you, realizing that learning anything complex may require trial and error. For me, the use of EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) has been revolutionary because it elegantly incorporates so many essential pieces of the emotional puzzle, surpassing the utility of anything else I know:
- It calms both the body's physical fight/flight/freeze response and the amygdala, the limbic center of the brain (which deals with emotion)
- It helps energy to flow more evenly through the body's energy meridians, which Traditional Chinese Medicine and other systems have recognized as key to the maintenance of human health for thousands of years
- It gives you a strong, calming focus for your mind, acting like a moving meditation with extra benefits
- It facilitates the opening of a conversation with your subconscious mind, allowing game-changing bolts of insight to surface about the origins of your habits/patterns, and your resistance to the changes you want to make in your life
- Overall, it helps you to quiet noise on all levels and get back to feeling a sense of clarity about yourself and your situation, as well as build confidence that you can accomplish the goals you seek
Wherever you are currently on the scale of comfort and facility with your emotions, I hope you find ways to move forward in your exploration, as no one can be whole without greater-than-average skill in this historically neglected area. If you befriend your emotions and learn to value them for the valuable guidance they can offer you, you actually open up new abilities to blaze trails more quickly and with less resistance and confusion and mess than ever before.