How to use your emotions

An emotion, by it’s very nature, is energy moving. This is good news for those of us who find ourselves stuck in certain emotions. Why? Because you can change them—emotions move!

You are not your emotions. You experience your emotions, based on the thoughts and beliefs you hold. As humans, we are easily controlled by our emotions because most of us have not learned to master them. Many of us think we are our emotions.

Consider how we speak. “I am sad…I am angry.” I had to call myself out on this earlier today. I’m not sad. I’m experiencing sadness. Likely, as a result of my interpretation of my current experience.

Emotions are Signals, so Read the Signs

So what exactly are they signifiers of? Your internal state of being. Okay what the heck does that mean? It just means the location where you are, energetically.

Pretend you’re a curios toddler, and you see an iron within reach. First, you’re in a curious state. This is a fun emotion, which often makes your heart race and your eyes widen. You stare at the shiny iron and you want to touch it, so you do. The heat scorches your hand and you rip your hand away quickly, yelling out in pain. What’s your emotional state now?

In your moment of yelling, it’s safe to say you have moved away from curiosity, and into a feeling of pain and probably fear. You’ve learned something: irons can get hot, and they can burn you. The burning hurts, and is a scary experience.

Now, in that predicament, the child’s ability to FEEL THE BURN was good, right? Of course it didn’t feel good for little Johnny to burn his hand, but it as for his highest good that he felt the burn, so that he could learn about his relationship to the iron.

His painful feeling was a SIGNAL to him, that in order to maintain a positive state, he’d have to remove his hand from that iron.

So in your life, how often do you find yourself beating up in yourself for having certain emotions? Do you even listen to your emotions? Are you paying attention to your emotional state to see if it’s really how you want to feel?

Sometimes I wake up grumpy, and I don’t like it. What do I do? Sometimes I meditate, sometimes I doodle. Sometimes I punch my pillow, sometimes I write an angry rant. Sometimes I listen to affirmations or music. The point is, I do something about it. Emotions signify where you are; they are alerting you to your state of being.

Stop numbing out and Get to Know the Emotions Personally

What does sadness feel like for you? What happens in your body or your face when you feel excited? How about happiness? Awe?Wonder? Fear? Ecstasy? Surprise? We all have our own experiences of these emotions.

I’ve been studying emotions for a few years now, because I realized in my early twenties that I wasn’t very emotionally intelligent. Half the time I ignored my feelings completely, preferring to numb out. I’ll admit, it was an easier way to exist. But I didn’t like the feeling of powerlessness that crept back in eventually.

Numbing out, while effective, has repercussions. You know how you get drunk and then you come down feeling worse than before? Or if you decide to smoke some weed because your day was hard, you get high and on the come down you’re still feeling like crap?

This is the typical cycle of drug abuse. If you use anything to cover up your feelings: tv, books, other people, sex, shopping, the list goes on and on…when you are done using those things, if you haven’t addressed the emotions and consciously worked to shift them, you still gotta do that work.

The pain will continue to haunt you. Unless you ignore it and just remain an addict. Which is totally your choice. We all have to learn what we want from our own experiences.

Google “list of emotions” and get to know them. There are so many types of emotions, but it all boils down to this scale:

Love/Unity (HIGHEST)

Neutral

Fear/Shame (LOWEST)

Everything falls in between these with love being the highest, and fear being the lowest. All the positive ones are closer to love. Don’t confuse love with desire or lust. Desire would actually be on the lower end of the scale, somewhere between fear and neutrality.

Now though I wrote out the emotions in a hierarchal scale, I like to think of emotions as cyclical these days. This is because as a human, you will experience a range of emotions, not just the high ones.

The lower emotions are not necessarily evil, after all it’s just different states of energy. Our job as beings, is to learn what emotions we prefer to experience, and work to maintain them. We don’t have to run from negative emotion, instead, we can feel it, and when we’re over it, choose to feel differently.

HOW TO USE YOUR EMOTIONS in Summary

Once you have gotten to know how different emotions feel for you, make a practice to consciously decide how you want to feel, and then go there.( you may have to use tools).

For example, let say I wake up feeling lonely. My breathing is slow, and I just want to throw the comforter over my head.

I can ask myself: do I want to feel this right now? Can this emotion serve me in any way right now? Maybe my answer is no. So then I ask myself, what emotion do I want to feel?

Maybe I want to feel hopeful, so I listen to Tony Robbins or read a Deepok Chopra book, or watch Ralph Smart.

After the video, I should feel closer to hopeful. But if I don’t, it’s okay I’ll try something else.

The point is, emotions are nothing more than a signal as to where you are energetically vibrating at the moment. Use emotions to learn yourself, and to learn what works for you.

Do you find more success when you’re happy? Angry? Sad? Joyous? Appreciative? Loving?

Only you can answer that, and only you can control what emotional states you allow yourself to stay in. My ultimate goal is to be able to feel whatever I want, whenever I want, without the use of anything outside of my own mind. I’m not there yet, but I’m getting close!

So use your emotions, don’t let them use you!

How do you use your emotions in your day to day life? Do you keep track of how you feel throughout the day? Would love to hear from you!

Love,

Nia Venus 💋