Emotional Training Part I
The world of emotions has always confounded me – what are emotions
exactly, why do some people tend towards a particular range of them, do
we get to transcend them as we move up the evolutionary ladder and, in
the meanwhile, how do we grow from the messy, tender, enigmatic things?
Two readings this week have begun an interesting line of enquiry into
emotions and their place in the human experience. This excerpt is the
first part of the teaching, the rest will follow in the next newsletter:
‘Consider yourself standing in a train station. In front of you is a
train with a host of carriages. This is the Train of Emotion, with each
carriage representing a different emotion ranging right the way from
grief to rapture with everything in-between. At any given point in time
you step into a particular carriage, let’s say ‘Anger’. When you are
experiencing the emotion of anger, it is NOT YOU that has become anger,
you are simply within anger in the same way you are within a specific
carriage for a certain part of your journey. The language you are used
to identifies you far too strongly with your emotions. You say ‘I am
angry’ and as a result your identity becomes too closely related to
anger. It would be more useful to understand that you are within anger;
in this way you don’t consider that you are anger itself any more than
you would consider that you are the carriage you occupy at any given
time. The emotion is simply the vehicle that is carrying you at any
moment.
When you are able to dissociate your emotion from who you are, it is
much easier to make use of it. Every single emotion is useful and godly,
even if you have been taught that ‘negative’, or unpleasant ones are
not. It is possible to become powerful while you are within ‘negative’
emotional states and very weak while you are within ‘positive’ ones, can
you see that? Consider how disempowered some people become while they
are in love and how strong others become from a period of despair. That
shows you that it is not the carriage you are in that determines whether
you are being powerful or not, it is the way you respond to being in
that carriage.
It is not your conscious self that chooses the carriage you are in at
any specific moment, have you noticed?! Do you wake up and decide
consciously to be depressed, or elated on a given day? Can you will
yourself to authentically feel any emotion at any time? No. It is your
higher self, or soul, who puts you in a carriage according to the life
plan it is guiding you through. That is why some people respond to a
situation with laughter and others with tears – there is no
‘appropriate’ emotion for a given situation, there is only the emotional
range that your soul is busy developing from at this time and it will
place you in a carriage accordingly.
Does that mean you are at the mercy of your emotions and unaccountable
for them? Certainly not! As we have said, your point of control is the
way you choose to respond to being in a particular carriage. You can
fight it, be ashamed of it, try to claw your way out of the door or try
to cling on desperately to the feeling, if you like it. You can deny
where you are, ignore it, repress it or become so addicted to the pain
that you never let go of it. We would instead suggest the following if
you would like to use any given carriage, or emotion, to become more
powerful:
1. Clarify where exactly you are at any moment using as precise a word
as possible (e.g. does ‘feeling down’ mean feeling sad, empty or
resentful?)
2. Acknowledge and, if you can, be grateful for that carriage, or
emotion (this is the most immediate catalyst for opening up the gift in
it)
3. Identify any judgments you hold about this carriage (it helps to
think about where you have judged others for feeling the same thing e.g.
‘she really shouldn’t be so joyous, her mother only died a few weeks
ago’)
April 2006
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