We are not powerless over our emotions
by Pip Wilson

Most people, it seems, believe that humans are powerless over their emotions.

However, I now know this sense of powerlessness is one of life’s great misconceptions. While we are relatively (not completely) powerless over emotions from showing up in our lives, we have a huge amount of power about how we respond to, manage and organise our feelings.

When we manage our feelings, our thinking will follow those feelings. Just as when we are crazy with anger our heads don't work well, so it is that when we feel great feelings, our minds will think great thoughts. Below are some tips and techniques for emotional management. I have learned them in many ways, experiences and places and it is my privilege to share them with you.

I feel 90 per cent good 90 per cent of the time. I don’t ask for much more than that. Yet in April 1998 I felt so horrible that I was about to take my own life. Fortunately a remarkable intervention saved me from that awful act. I was so fortunate not to have died, that now I want to share with others the steps I took to change from feeling lousy to feeling good. How have I achieved this turnaround? Do I possess a secret formula?

No, I have simply learned a few techniques, and put them into practice. I am building my own 'feelgood' technology and you can too with these and any other tools you seek out.

Illusions and misconceptions Perhaps it’s a good idea to find tools that can be used for our emotional health that complement spiritual practice – techniques that do not conflict in any way with whatever spiritual beliefs we might hold, if any. I feel confident in saying that these tools below will not clash with any spiritual path you might be on.

The illusion of external emotions First, however, we need to become aware of, and deconstruct, some illusions – illusions that we, as humans, all live with most of the time.

For example, one illusion we all share is that the earth is flat, although photographs from space prove otherwise. Even though we know in our heads that the world is round, we behave and think as if it were flat.

We also think that matter is solid, though it is mostly empty space. We behave and talk as if the sun revolves around the earth – we say it rises and sets. We also act as if the days are grouped naturally into weeks of seven days, and believe that the past is actually impinging on our enjoyment of the present.

Similarly, it is quite normal to believe, or rather, to feel, that the source or cause of our emotions often comes from outside our bodies.

All in our capsule of meat What seems to me to be true, however, is that everything we think and feel takes place within our own bodies, our own ‘capsule of meat’ as I call it.

By and large, people don't physically affect each other's emotions or thoughts. Yet we habitually imagine that people can influence our feelings and our minds by their words, actions or even thoughts. The children’s rhyme is more accurate: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me!”

Although it feels as though what we are feeling comes from the outside, in truth, what we're feeling is actually our own, internal response to stimuli. In the main, we affect only ourselves, and others affect only themselves. This is a primary truth of emotions, one that is important to grasp fully.

Our mistaken expressions of speech

The illusions, however, are strong. We even have expressions that perpetuate them, like:

• "Sandra hurt my feelings."
• "John makes me feel young again."
• "The Rolling Stones turn me on."
• "Winning the lottery made Laura happy."
• "Jack bores me."
• "That idiot makes me so mad!"

In fact, all of the emotions referred to in these examples are entirely generated by us within our own meat – our nervous system (especially the brain), our endocrine system, our lymphatic system – the whole miraculous complex of compound chemicals that we call the body.

Fortunately, although the English language has limited emotional symbology, it actually does contain words and expressions that relate to the bodily presence of our emotions: gut feeling; haven’t got the stomach for it; spineless; hot under the collar; tense; heartless, and so on.

Whenever we feel like we are on an emotional roller coaster, where is this roller coaster actually taking place? Clearly, it is all in our bodies, not in the air around us, nor outer space. It just appears that way sometimes. Similarly, if we see a beautiful thing, like a tree, we can be misled into thinking that the feeling of beauty is in the space between us and the tree. If you consider this, I'm sure you'll agree, it's really in the chemicals that make up our bodies, but it seems to be in the air.

So we need to tune into our bodies' feelings quite precisely. Once we can internalise, at a deep, 'gut' or 'heart' level, the truth that our emotions are physical phenomena within our personal 'chemistry sets,' we are well on the way to being able to act as our own alchemists and quite quickly become masters of our own emotions.

By the way, it is absolutely essential to separate the label we give emotions, from the feelings themselves. I ask myself "What am I feeling?" because it is more useful to me than "How am I feeling?" I need to know what I am actually feeling within my body as my emotional barometer fluctuates.

The goal is to feel our bodies so precisely, so attentively, that when we have an emotion, we know where and how it is occurring in our bodies. We would do well to cultivate an inner dialog something like this: "It’s not up in the sky, so where exactly is this feeling? Is it in my arms, abdomen, upper chest, neck, or a combination of these? Does my face feel warmer and redder? Is there a flow of some chemicals to the top of my shoulders, or do my hands feel somehow different? If so, what part of the hands?" And so on.

Words like 'angry,' ‘sad,' 'joyful,' 'reverent,' 'contented' and so on are merely convenient labels. They help us name our true feelings. Just as a gardener needs to intimately know the plants themselves and not just their names, the answers to our questions about our own emotions are better in terms of sensation rather than labels.

Working backwards The mind, the body and the emotions are all interlinked and each affects the other. What we do with our minds influences what we do with our bodies, and vice versa. For example, first we decide to paint a picture, then our bodies do it; we pick up a paintbrush, and we start thinking like a painter.

What we do with our emotions affects our minds, and vice versa. We feel anxious, and our thoughts become like a swarm of bees:

(Feelings --> thoughts)
We think of ourselves as funny, and we start feeling funny:

(Thoughts --> Feelings)
What we do with our bodies affects our emotions, and vice versa. We slump our shoulders and faces in a posture of depression, and we feel depressed:

(Body --> Feelings)
We are feeling bliss and our breathing, heart rate and posture change to ‘bliss’ mode:

(Feelings --> Body)
Ways of seeing

Most Westerners are aware of this Thinking --> Emotions --> Bodily behaviour

Too few Westerners are aware of this Bodily behaviour --> Emotions --> Thinking

Beyond Freud In our Western society, we tend to concentrate on changing our emotions with our minds. The Freudian model of therapy set the stage for this a century ago: by talking about our lives we affect our emotional state.

While this is true, since Freud we have mostly forgotten the fact that we can change our thinking by first changing our emotions.

Similarly we can get the emotions we want by altering our bodies first. We often need to work backwards, starting with the physiology of our bodies, and watching how our emotions change as a result of changes we make in our physiology.

Then, as our emotions change, our thinking also changes. In other words, we can manage our emotions.

Reprinted with permision of the author, Pip Wilson, Wilson's Almanac www.wilsonsalmanac.com