Some tips & techniques for emotional management
1 This life is not a dress rehearsal. This is my life and I won’t mess it up any more.
2 The aims of my life are to (a) feel ecstatic and loving; (b) fulfil my dreams; (c) be useful to my family, humanity and the Universe; (d) harm no one and no thing; (e) waste no time. (You, of course, will have your own list.)
3 Ninety-five per cent of human suffering is self-inflicted, at least in the affluent countries. If I can eradicate the 95 percent, I should be able to handle the 5 percent over which I am truly powerless, like stubbed toes, disease, and so on.
4 I have suffered long enough and I won’t do it to myself another day. Time is short. I might die tonight. I lost too long to misery. I’d better get serious about my own happiness. If not, I’ve only got myself to blame, for no one can do it for me.
5 I believe in a
Higher Power – not
necessarily a
deity who intervenes in lives, but some mysterious
Source, with its integrating and healing power I can intuit around me. My mind is part of this greater Whole. My Higher Power is manifest in my higher thinking.
I commit myself to thinking and behaving as though my life were entirely up to me, in a world that is a mixture of cause-event and randomness,
pleasure and
pain. My Higher Power assists my thinking and feeling, and will do for me whatever internal changes I can’t do for myself. My mind is thus a self-healing organism.
6 I show trust in my own higher thinking by affirming each morning “More will definitely be revealed today. I won’t seek, I’ll find”. Then I wait for the mini-epiphanies and always try to remember to give thanks for them.
7 Attitude is everything. I intend to cultivate good attitudes in all things.
8 I believe that we reap what we sow. So I try to sow correct thoughts and reprogram bad, useless or unhealthy ones
9 I am predestined for nothing and there is no predestination nor immutability in my personality traits or defects of character.
10 I am intrinsically alone. I was born alone and will die alone. I treasure my relationships, and I’m committed to my responsibilities (family and so on) but I try to feel and practice my personal aloneness, self-duty and self-preservation. My responsibility to me is making myself feel fantastic and be useful to the Universe while harming no one.
11 I am free. I am nobody’s servant or whipping boy. I am not a victim. My place in the universe is as valid as anyone's.
12 I want to be at least civil even to my ‘enemies’, even if I haven’t in the past.
13 Feeling fantastic goes hand in hand with my unfolding understanding of ‘spirituality’.
14 I ‘do’ my own feelings. I am not dependent on anyone else. If I have an anxiety attack, I am not attacked by ‘anxieties’ like a swarm of wasps. I do it to myself. So I refuse to cause any more pain on my body.
15 Feelings are like fluids in the body. To control my emotions I must feel each feeling in my body.
16 Feelings are like muscles. Each one can atrophy, and each can be exercised back to strength. (Not many people know this, so I am very fortunate.)
17 Feelings are invoked by (a) bodily attitude, and (b) mental visualisation. If I can’t tap into a present feeling, like ‘confidence’, at this actual moment, I rummage through my mental filing cabinet and borrow an image from my childhood or a movie I saw or book I read, or a song or piece of music.
18 Thoughts follow feelings, probably more than vice versa. If I cultivate the feelings I want, the thoughts will follow. (If I say ‘feeling’, I mean feeling, not disembodied or ideal, but sensations in the different parts of the body. I don’t want to know ‘how’ I am feeling, I want to know ‘what’ I am feeling. For example, where in the body, what does it feel like? I try hard not to use labels (angry, hopeful, sad, enthusiastic, etc) disconnected from the actual physical sensation. With practice I improve at my sensibilities.)
19 Feelings follow behaviours. In order to change what I'm feeling, I move my body to imitate and access the feelings I want. I practice in the privacy of my own home, and in the world.
For example, I can’t feel confident if I walk into a room like a loser. I can’t feel enthusiastic if I sit slumped and shallow-breathe.
To get the feeling we label ‘passion’, for example, I breathe in, recalling visually a past situation that invokes it.
20 Breathing is as important as body stance. Holding the breath ten times for ten seconds helps me to shift emotions. I try to remember to do it several times a day.
21 People speak of drug users as having a 'drug of choice', be it marijuana, cocaine or whatever. We want 'feelings of choice', and we want them easy to get.
I try to imagine a supermarket of feelings, with thousands of items. I just go to the shelf, choose what I feel like having, and fill my shopping cart.
22 Tomorrow isn’t here yet.
Christian religion say: "Take therefore not thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself." (Matt. 6:34 KJV)
The
Buddha said much the same thing, warning against
maya (Hindu: illusion).
Projecting the future is toxic. I train my head not to travel backwards or forwards in time except for healthy purposes.
There are only 24 hours in the day; every 24-hour period is the canvas with which I work. Every time I tap into 10 seconds of a good feeling is 10 seconds I can’t be feeling a bad one. They add up.
23
I take responsibility for the quality of my day and life. The past is gone and only ‘exists’ for experience. Life begins today, right now! What I do, think and feel today will create the matrix for tomorrow’s practice.
24 Make
a list of good feelings
Here’s a typical list of feelgood labels. Take a few minutes, read each one aloud with feeling. Notice how your body responds. If you discover you're not getting much body response, stand up and act it out. Watch what happens to your mood.
Comfort, love, joy, enthusiasm, passion, compassion, sweetness, power, strength, kindliness, peace, serenity, sexiness, awe, wonder, adoration, sacredness, divinity, humour, giggle, belly-laugh, “I’ll show them!”, pride, “I’m a winner”, “look ma, no hands”, grateful, considerate, confidence, assurance, popular, conquering hero, dragonslayer, nurturer, nurtured, mellow, ecstasy, bliss, ‘can do’, ‘will do’, exultation, ‘no longer a procrastinator’, orgasmic, favourite poet, favourite movie/music/song, sunset, sunbaking, bizarro, wacky, wise, patient, likeable, trustworthy, good, brave, etc.
Make a list of your own 40 or 50 and feel what each one does to your body. Do it now before you forget.
24
Gratitude And Other Feelings
Gratitude is a feeling, as well as a state of mind. Gratitude has an almost magical ability to lighten and improve our 'mood' (remember, a mood is actually a chemical swirl in the body)..
Starting each morning by asking what you are really grateful for is a powerful way to set the tone of your day.
You’ll find that some good feelings are better than others. Here’s an example: to me, ‘sexy’ feels better than ‘pensive’, and ‘passionate’ feels better than ‘neat and tidy’. But they’re all feel-goods – like drugs with no withdrawals. And your list of feelgood words won't be the same as mine, or anyone else's, so experiment, and have fun.
This is not to say that there are some feelings we can avoid. We also need to develop feelings like 'dutiful' and 'self-sacrificial' which are fine but not necessarily as 'high' as 'blissed out'. However, in time, even these become easier as we drink our daily fill of our feelings-of-choice.
Figure out which feelings you like best and make a habit of them.
25 My happiness is NOT dependent on anything or anyone. Not money, girlfriend, wife, sex, fame, house, travel. Your's isn't either. Why should we make ourselves hurt because we haven’t got something?
26 The rituals of being depressed and powerless are far more difficult than directly tapping into a good feeling.
Nurturing our Top 50 emotions will change our lives by denying bandwidth/space to the feelings we definitely do not want.
27
The Brain As Computer
How you talk to yourself determines a great deal of how you feel. That's because your brain is a computer. Ask it sensible, sharpened questions designed to generate creative answers rather than questions that are apt to get answers that will make you feel worse. For example, if you ask yourself (or your oversoul/Higher Power) something like “Why am I so fat/thin/ugly/dumb
/unpopular/weak/ etc", your brain is very likely to answer something like: “Because you’re a piece of garbage, because you were brought up by morons", and so on!
On the other hand, if you ask "What do I need to do to lose/gain/look good/make friends/get stronger etc", your brain is likely to come up with some truly creative ideas.
You can get even better answers if you add a phrase like "and feel ok while I'm doing it."
Then you have to pay attention – usually by writing the better questions down, and writing the answers down as well. Leave the rest to the hyperlink between hand and Source in the sky.
Given a chance, your brain will set to work immediately to answer the questions you put to it. This, I believe, is why
Jesus said, “Ask, and it shall be given to you: seek and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened for you.” (Matt. 7:7 KJV).
I'm not religious, but if you pray, make sure the prayer-questions are smart ones. This should be daily practice with pen and paper.
28
The brain as pleasure seeker
Remember: the human nervous system, including the brain, always chooses pleasure over pain. Most of our lives revolve around these two parameters.
If I have things I should be doing but my being is resisting (eg, mowing the lawn; doing the tax return; exercising), I write down ten ways I will feel more pleasure if I do the thing. Then I write down ten ways I will feel more pain if I don’t.
Writing ten things makes it clearer. I find that my brain, unconsciously, starts to select pleasure over pain, and I always effortlessly shift towards the thing I should be doing, over a period of a few hours or days. This process also works well for goals, like career and travel.
29
Do the right thing by everyone, and also trust yourself, no one
else, until having properly and honestly examined the situation.
Perhaps discussing with trusted loved ones. My tip is to urge you to
set goals, but only those which you honestly believe to be
realistic. And if others might not think so, I hope they'd have the
decency to tell you so you can weigh up all possible sides of the
matter. I suggest that you remind yourself every day of some very
core
beliefs of yours. We all have many. Just a few of mine are
iterated in just some of my many
affirmations.
(And I believe that affirmations, done honestly and as well as I can
possibly do them, are grist for the
mill of the
spirit.) "I believe that I'll never
die
of
assault,
thirst, nor
hunger, as long as I live in
Bellingen Shire. Nor be
short of
people I
love,
and who love me, and good
memories, and a
beautiful
environment,
microclimate, culture, etc, and continue having the best time of my
life, for decades to come. I believe that
Permaculture will thrive in the shire, both in ideas and
practice. I believe that I'll adapt to whichever
wanted, or unwanted, thing occurs. I'll adapt effortlessly, bravely,
remarkably and successfully with whatever circumstances befall me,
for good, or ill." "I believe that one day I'll be
even better known in Bellingen, even better than now (which I dig).
And that one day, I believe that I'll be famous in Australia for my writing,
fiction, non fiction, and poetry, all on Wilson's
Almanac. Even if it takes me to the end of my life, and if I die
really, really old, I won't care. I'll be overjoyed. Unless the
mourners are a day
bloody late after the funeral. Then, I guess, 'up there', I'll probably be happy
anyway." Stuff like that.
As you work with these ideas you'll discover how much power you actually have over the way you experience your life. Keep practising – they do work.
Start with small weights and keep increasing them daily. In three months your friends won't recognise you. In one year you won't recognise yourself.
I wish you all the best.
Pip Wilson
Stet
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