What Are You Feeling and Why?

What will you feel today? 

Over the course of a moment, a morning, a day, and a week we feel a lot. 

A fair amount of this is physical, and much of it is emotional. We all perceive and process feelings differently. We can all benefit from becoming more adept at moderating our feelings to our advantage.

This post is focused on emotions though it will likely apply to the physical as well.

According to the author of The Neurogenesis Diet, Brant Cortright, there are eight human emotions. Seven of them have low and high-level intensity. They are as follows:

Caring ---------> Love

Interest -------> Excitement

Enjoyment ---> Joy

_________________________

Fear -----------------> Terror

Anger ---------------> Rage

Sadness ------------> Depression

Embarrasment ---> Shame

Disgust

In a previous post, I shared a prompt of beginning your day with a brief ritual of seven 60 second practices. This practice is a means to ground and then prime your mind to create the ideal in your day. By taking charge of your mental and emotional state at the beginning of your day, you empower yourself and lessen the impact of external events.

Hopefully, you awaken in a neutral or optimistic frame of mind most days. The great thing about the suggested practice is it allows you to choose your state of mind.

Once you are out in the world, interacting with people that likely are not consciously choosing their mental and emotional state, you are less vulnerable to becoming a victim of chance and chaos.

It may also benefit you to do several 60-second practices at regular intervals throughout the day. By practicing, you become adept at maintaining control of yourself. In time, you will be able to hold yourself through occurrences that knock most people down. By making this practice a habit, you are conditioning yourself to become more in control of your mental and emotional state.

Let's delve into the practice of monitoring your emotions. When you find yourself caring about something, do your best to notice it. Witness yourself feeling this way and stretch the caring towards love. 

Do your best to immerse yourself in the feeling. Process it through all of your perceptual channels. Get very acquainted with this sensation. Know where it resides and resonates within you.

Next, be prepared to notice yourself being interested in something, again witness yourself behaving that way and cultivate that interest so that it becomes excitement. Again, run this through your perceptual stations. Place and mark the areas you experience this feeling in your body and mind.

Finally, do a similar exercise with enjoyment. First, notice and then magnify it so that it becomes joy. Feel it and then anchor it within yourself using all of your senses.

Here we're going to shift gears to a bit of background and then metaphor. I love high performance. When I first learned to drive a car, I wanted to learn how to not only drive fast but corner fast, stop fast and slide fast. I love high-performance driving.

When learning high-performance driving, you are taught that look where you want to go if you lose control of the vehicle. Do not focus on what you want to avoid. Focus on where you want to go. 

Alright, let's apply this lesson to our emotions. We are cruising through our day, making significant progress through an important task, when suddenly, someone or something happens that has us spinning out of control. If we've done our practice, we immediately know what to do. 

Focus on where we need to go, where we want to go. It may be towards Joy, or it could be towards Excitement or Love. Focus on them. Do not allow your body or mind to drift towards fear, anger, sadness or embarrassment. 

Once you gather it up, you are back in control. Acknowledge what sent you into the spin. Honor it, learn from it and then move on.

We must practice this activity in low stake situations to become automatic when the consequences are high. Practice. Make this practice a habit. 

We must choose to guide our emotions. We have limited time and energy. We can choose to utilize our time and energy on love, excitement, and joy, or we can give them to fear, anger, sadness and embarrassment. 

Of course, there is a time to feel all of the emotions. They all serve a purpose, and they each have their place. Just don't let them arbitrarily take over your life. Work with your emotions and through them instead of moving into or becoming them.

Make a habit of being aware of your emotional and mental states.