take-aways

• what are emotions

  • Emotions are action-requiring neurological programs that bring you specific gifts and skills to help you understand your world. Each of your emotions requires its own action, and each action helps you learn more about yourself and your environment. When you know what emotions are for, you can respond to them in new ways and discover your inborn emotional genius!

• Unlocking Stress & Resistance

  • Stress and resistance are masking words for emotional responses to difficult situations. The key to unmasking your emotions is to catch yourself when you describe yourself as “stressed out.” What do you mean by that? What do you feel? What are your emotions trying to tell you, and why are those emotions arising? What actions should you take? Are changes coming too quickly (see Fear)? Are your boundaries being threatened (see Anger)? Are you losing access to important resources (see Envy)? Are you holding on to something that really doesn’t work (see Sadness)? Have you suffered a loss (see Grief)? And so on. Stress is always an emotional reaction to whatever is occurring around you – and you know how to work with emotions.
  • Resistance can look like an unwillingness to engage with what is occurring, but the truth is deeper than that. Resisting something is also a way to stop everything and underscore and highlight the situation; if you can turn toward your resistance and its emotional content, you will often discover absolute genius inside it.

• Emotions and feelings – what’s the difference?

  • Emotions are reliable neurological programs that arise in response to specific stimuli. Your ability to feel and properly identify your emotions determines your level of emotional awareness. As a reminder, this is the complete flowchart – from stimulus to action – that we explored in our presentation today:
    • Emotionally evocative stimulus → Emotion arises → You feel it → You identify it → You question the emotion → You act on the information the emotion provides OR you decide not to act because the stimulus is invalid
  • I know this seems like a long pathway, but you can actually do it in a split second once you get your emotional skills under you. It’s not hard. It’s actually much harder in the long run to sleepwalk through your life, being pushed around by emotions you can’t identify or understand.
  • When an emotion is evoked, it gives you information about an emotionally relevant stimulus, and it tells you what you’ve perceived and what you’re experiencing. Your job as the partner of your emotions is to feel and identify the emotion, ask the correct questions, and act in a way that is both emotional and rational. This is not only possible but it’s also doable, and this process becomes very easy (and fun, and enlightening) once you get the hang of it. Thank you for bringing your emotional awareness to a waiting world!

• Expression, Repression, and the Middle Ground

  • Many of us have been taught to express or repress our emotions; and we weren’t taught about any other options. Although expression and repression can be helpful at times, “neither approach works because neither one accepts emotions as important messengers that help us learn and evolve” (pg. 33).
  • If you can learn to work with your emotions and discover the messages they contain, you can access the skills and abilities inside each of them – and develop a more wholesome and conscious understanding of yourself and others. This process of listening to your emotions, supporting them, and identifying their purpose is called channeling:

• quarternity model

  • In this model, your earth element symbolizes your physical and bodily experiences; your air element characterizes your intellect and your cognitive abilities; your water element embodies the flow and depth of your emotions; and your fire element represents your spiritual, visionary, and contemplative realms.

• The idea that judgment stops you from experiencing life fully is false. Judgment is the ability to react as an individual and use your discerning intelligence freely. We need to rescue our much-wronged ability to judge and bring it back to a place of honor at the center of our lives.

• Healthy judgment is a combination of your airy intellect and your watery emotions coming together to form a considered opinion. It helps you define yourself in the world and separate the wheat from the chaff. This process of definition keeps you focused and centered. It’s an internal decision-making process about what a thing is and whether it suits you or not. Thoughts and emotions are partners. They’re not enemies.

• We’ve all been trained to overemphasize our intellects and undervalue our emotions. We don’t know how to feel deeply and think brilliantly at the same time, and we’re incapable of connecting our emotional flow to our intellectual processes.

• New vision of self: When all of your elements are flowing and balanced, you develop a meta-intelligent, fifth element personality and a fuller experience of what it is to be a whole and integrated person. A wonderful aspect of balancing your elements is that it is a fairly simple task once you realize that balance is a possibility. However, it can be challenging at first to reach this level of wholeness and integration.

• Many of us use addictions and distractions to get through our days and deal with challenging aspects of our lives. Although these practices can help us take our minds off of things, they are not generally forthright ways to deal with troubling situations. As you gently observe your own addictive and avoidant tendencies, it can help to understand why you’re distracting yourself and what you’re avoiding:

• One key to ending suffering is to fully understand the causes and dimensions of our suffering. When we regularly rely on addictions and distractions to deal with pain and suffering, we are actually stopping ourselves from forming a clear and precise picture of what our suffering is about. When we can instead feel our emotions and balance our internal elements

• Empathically speaking, traumatic and dissociative behaviors are almost always contagious. Our disavowed (though never absent) empathic skills always alert us to traumatic behaviors and dissociation in other people. As a species, we have been socialized to dissociate and distract ourselves from life as a matter of course, and as a result, most of us aren’t fully aware of how or why we dissociate.”

• trauma responses

  • repression, learn to traumatize themselves
  • expression, traumatize others
  • channel it from within an awakened psyche, to enter consciously, to dive into the emotions, the thoughts, the visions, and the sensations - and to turn the trauma on its ear.

• stages of initiation

  • stage one: separation from the known world. Disorganized removal from the known world - a sudden, shocking, and wholly unexpected end to normalcy.
  • stage two: a brush with death. It is the out of control moment of the assault - the beating, the yelling, the unwelcome touch that separates spirit from body, or the beginning of the operation.
  • stage three: being welcomed as an initiated person. Sadly, in trauma, there is no welcoming back for trauma survivors.

• When we can understand and work with our emotions in empathic and respectful ways, they can help us work through pain and trauma. Emotions are messages from deep within ourselves; they tell us what’s going on – and what we need to do – in any situation

• Many of us have been taught that forgiveness is necessary before we can move on from painful or traumatic situations. We’ve also been taught that anger is toxic. Sadly, these ideas are only partially true, and they can actually slow down our healing. Anger and forgiveness can work beautifully together if we know how to honor them appropriately

• getting grounded

  • Centering our attention in our bodies in the present moment is uncommon in our culture because so many modern people make distinct separations between the physical (or profane) world and the spiritual (or divine) realm… When you have proper grounded focus, you can direct flows in each of your elements, and you can learn to navigate those flows rather than being pushed around. When you can navigate, you won’t need to distract yourself or avoid your emotions, because you’ll be able to focus your attention properly

  • Grounding is a form of running your life energy downward. It helps you connect to your qi source, which is located in your lower belly beneath your navel or in your solar plexus, and connects you to the earth. From there, your movement into deeper practice and strength flows naturally.

  • To ground yourself, breathe into your belly and imagine that you’re gathering warmth and light in your belly, and as you breathe out, imagine that your breath and light are moving down through your body and into your chair.

  • Grounding is the master skill in this process because it helps you focus yourself inside your body while you connect yourself to the earth. It helps you remain centered in the outer world by giving you a way to cleanse and stabilize yourself in the inner world.

  • Grounding is the opposite of dissociation. When you can ground your tension and any intense emotions, you won’t need to blast other people or repress everything. You’ll be able to figure out why you’re ungrounded and address it.

• Our culture supports distraction and dissociation at every possible turn; therefore, remaining centered and integrated can be rather difficult. In order to stay focused and grounded, you’ll need protection and definition; you’ll need a sacred place where you can work without interference, and you’ll need a strong and flexible boundary around yourself

• Complaining consciously is a healthy way to become aware of, express, and release what’s going on inside of you – in safety and privacy. Conscious complaining is especially helpful in a life of striving, good works, and personal growth, where complaining is often considered less than saintly (this is a shame, because all by itself, a lack of permission to complain can cause unresolving repetitive mood states like worry, depression, and apathy). Conscious complaining gives a voice to your struggles, and in so doing, it restores your flow, your energy, your sense of humor, and your hope

• As you work to balance your elements and engage with your emotions empathically, it’s important to have a practice for rejuvenating yourself. This practice helps you soothe yourself, take some quiet time to integrate the changes you’re making, and move forward refreshed. It’s important to rejuvenate yourself so that old behaviors won’t be able to reanimate themselves. When you clear a space in your psyche with contract burning, it’s important to refill yourself consciously. If you don’t consciously refill that empty space, it will be filled unconsciously, and you don’t want that!

• emotional vocabulary list

gifts in your emotions

• ANGER: The Honorable Sentry

  • ACTION REQUIRED: Anger arises to address threats to your voice, standpoint position, interpersonal boundaries, or self image.

  • GIFTS: Honor ~ Conviction ~ Healthy self esteem ~ Proper boundaries ~ Healthy detachment ~ Protection of yourself and others

  • THE INTERNAL QUESTIONS: What must be protected? What must be restored?

  • DISCUSSION: Think about your relationship with your own anger. Is it healthy? Do you regularly express your anger, or do you more often repress it? Have you ever channeled your anger in a way that works for everyone?

  • When you personify anger, you’ll find that it is a mix between a stalwart castle guard and an ancient sage. Anger sets your boundaries by walking the perimeter of your soul and keeping an eye on you, the people around you, and your environment.

  • Anger is a vital and boundary-defining emotion. When you can instead channel this noble emotion properly, you’ll be able to maintain your boundary and protect the boundaries of others with honor.

  • When we drop our vital, anger-supported boundaries and ignore our individual needs and wishes, we become extremely vulnerable. When the psyche is unprotected, anger becomes necessary, and if anger is constantly pushed into the shadows, it can only erupt in shadowy ways.

  • When you channel your anger properly, it will help you maintain your sense of self while protecting you and the people around you. When you go on a rampage, you dishonor everyone you encounter.

  • When you take hold of your anger and channel it properly, you allow your anger to arise when you’re attacked. You welcome the potent surge of indignation and honor the fact of the attack, instead of brushing it away with pseudospiritual gentility.

  • The Taoist saying The glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time you fall is especially valuable in understanding the honorable use of anger. When you can channel your angers, you won’t be invincible, but you’ll be able to see your fall clearly and rise again with honor and compassion.

  • When you are angry, you are honouring the person or situation that angers you. It’s difficult to honor something or someone that is unimportant to you. If you can use your anger to reset your boundary and burn your contracts with whatever has angered you, you’ll learn vital truths about the issues you need to face and the relationships you need to mend or honor.

  • When you’re done with the conflict, take some time to reground and refocus yourself. Anger releases a great deal of energy into your system, so it’s a good idea to refresh yourself and bring every part of you into the present moment, where you’re a different person than you were when the conflict began.

  • It may seem contradictory, but habitually angry people are also deeply caring people because anger always stems from concern. When people in your life are habitually angry, bless them; they are feeling too much of the world for their comfort, and their boundaries are in tatters.

  • If you feel unpleasant after effects from your anger, just empathize with them. If your anger causes any unpleasant after effects, know that you may have a punishing connection with it. Burn these contracts with your anger, and your anger will be able to flow properly and become the healing force it was meant to be.

• APATHY & BOREDOM: The Mask for Anger

  • ACTION REQUIRED: Apathy is a protective mask for anger, and it arises in situations where you cannot or should not (probably) express your anger openly.

  • GIFTS: Detachment ~ Boundary-setting ~ Separation ~ Taking a time-out

  • THE INTERNAL QUESTIONS: What is being avoided? What must be made conscious?

  • DISCUSSION: Do you feel apathetic or bored in any areas of your life? If so, think about how your apathy and boredom might be providing a protective mask for you.

  • If you’re unable or unwilling to deal with your anger, you’ll fall into the masking state of apathy. Apathy is a state of dissociation, usually caused by being stuck in the wrong environment for your needs. It seeks distractions such as TV, fun food, new loves, travel, money, and shopping.

  • Apathy and boredom are two of the most common symptoms of the environment being too small for your soul. They are signs of a lack of boundaries and a need for change, but they are done in an ineffectual and distractible way.

  • We struggle against our natural depressions and anxieties with incredible amounts of boredom-relieving stimuli. We can’t stop to feel or dream because we have to keep moving. In response, we become highly distractible automatons.

  • It is important to distinguish between apathy that arises from your unwillingness to rest and apathy that arises from your inability to set boundaries and channel your anger appropriately. If you are filled with apathy right now, honor it, but feed it with a deeper version of what it wants.

  • Apathy is a difficult condition to deal with because it is often caused by people isolating themselves or throwing their energy away rather than setting boundaries properly. You can help honor apathy in others by modeling honorable engagement.

• GUILT & SHAME: Restoring Integrity

  • ACTION REQUIRED: Shame arises to moderate your behavior and make sure that you don’t hurt, embarrass, destabilize, or dehumanize yourself or others.

  • GIFTS: Atonement ~ Integrity ~ Self-respect ~ Behavioral change

  • THE INTERNAL QUESTIONS: Who has been hurt? What must be made right?

  • DISCUSSION: Are there times when your shame feels repetitive or stuck? Is your shame authentic to you, or is it foreign shame that comes from authority figures, social training, toxic ideas, or the media? (The skill of Burning Contracts is a specific healing for foreign guilt and shame).

  • Guilt and shame are two of the most important emotions that help you mature into a well-regulated person. They help you understand yourself and your actions, and they help you honorably monitor your behavior, emotions, thoughts, and physical desires.

  • Guilt is the knowledge and acknowledgment of wrong doing. It is a state of circumstance, and you are either guilty or not guilty in relation to the legal or moral code you value. You cannot feel guilty, because guilt is a concrete state, not an emotional one. Shame is the natural emotional consequence of guilt and wrongdoing.

  • When shame arises in response to your own authentic and addressable flaws or missteps, it flows appropriately. If you welcome your appropriate shame, you’ll stop yourself before you do something crazy, before you say the wrong thing, or before you enter into unhealthy behaviors or relationships.

  • When we don’t have a healthy connection to our own shame, we’re often coerced into embodying other people’s ideas of right and wrong. This can lead to an incoherent shame spiral, where we’re simultaneously drawn toward and repelled by shameful and forbidden behaviors.

  • When you can identify your authentic shame, you’ll be able to brighten and define your boundary, ground yourself firmly, call your intellect into the situation, and examine (and destroy) the contracts that are attached to any excessive or inauthentic shame you might carry.

  • When you can honor and welcome your shame, it will give you the strength you need to address your ill-considered behaviors and to throw off the foreign tyrannies that disrupt your authenticity.

  • When your shame arises in the presence of others, it’s important to stop, ground yourself, and focus on it. If you can openly welcome your shame, it will recede naturally and swiftly.

  • When you’re grounded and centered within your vibrant, shame-supported boundary, the heat and intensity that shame carries will give you the energy you need to shine a spotlight on your own behavior and examine your contracts with whatever has brought your shame forward.

  • When you’re channeling rapids-level manufactured or trapped shame, each of your skills will help you remain stable. Your grounding will help you release any shame trapped in your body or your psyche, your inner focus will give you a private place from which to operate when your whole being is aflame, and your ability to burn contracts will help you identify and release any trapped shame messages.

  • When you’re coming out of a shame spiral, it’s important to replace your old, shame-based titles and labels with empowering phrases. For instance, if your smoking bothers you, and your habitual phrase is I can’t stop smoking! I’ve tried a hundred times. I’m just an addict! you can change your words into forceful ones and assert, I won’t stop smoking! I refuse to.

  • If you don’t find a lot of shaming titles in your psyche, but you still struggle with repetitive shame, you may have boundary trouble. When your boundary is weak or unsuitably inflated, you may tend to enmesh with others simply because your personal boundary isn’t well-defined.

  • It’s important to help your children connect to their authentic shame in healthy ways. This can be done by letting them be involved in setting punishments for their misdeeds. When they can be involved in deciding upon their acts of contrition, they can connect to their shame in healthy ways.

  • We have all become so used to dealing with shame that we don’t even recognize it when it arises. It is so vital to the sanctity of the soul that when it is released, it will work unceasingly to expose inferiorities and restore integrity.

• HATRED: The Profound Mirror

  • ACTION REQUIRED: Hatred arises in the presence of shadow material (things you cannot accept in yourself, and demonize in others). Shadow work helps you reintegrate and detoxify this material so that it no longer activates your hatred program.

  • GIFTS: Intense awareness ~ Piercing vision ~ Sudden evolution ~ Shadow work

  • THE INTERNAL QUESTIONS: What has fallen into my shadow? What must be reintegrated?

  • DISCUSSION: If you feel comfortable, talk about some of your hatreds in the group. What do you think your hate targets say about the unlived and unconscious parts of you?

  • Hatred is a natural and healthy emotion, but it can also be used to alert you to specific interior issues that hinder and endanger you. It is not mere dislike, which goes away when you separate yourself from people who behave badly.

  • The shadow is the portion of the psyche that we are not aware of, because we deny it. It holds our squelched impulses, our unfelt emotions, our unacceptable behaviors, and our unlived dreams.

  • You have the right to feel hatred. It is a sign that something is wrong with you if you can’t feel it. Hatred is a powerful tool that can help you move through difficult issues and catapult yourself into new levels of awareness.

  • When we express hatred, we fool ourselves into thinking that we’re completely separate from our hate targets. But in reality, we’re depending on them to live out parts of our own shadow.

  • When we project our material onto others, we lose our integrity, our honor, and our skills. When we project our shadow material onto others, we often can’t work with it in straightforward ways, so we project it.

  • When we find people who can really live out our unwanted material – our selfishness, our power, our arrogance, our brilliance, our ignorance, and our sexual appetites – there is a bacchanal in our souls. We are mesmerized and fascinated, and we can’t take our eyes off of them.

  • When we enforce these shadowy contracts with others, our boundaries are stripped, our focus is thrown outside of ourselves, and our villages are in complete disarray. We also dishonor our targets, whether we hate them or adore them, because we force them to become something other than human.

  • When you are in a hatred spiral with someone, you need a strong and disruptive emotion to separate yourself and rebuild your boundary from scratch. This is no time for gentleness; you need the big guns. So go ahead and flame on - it will heal your boundary, your behavior, and your relationships.

  • When you’ve burned a few contracts with your hate target, you’re ready to move on to the real work of understanding what makes your hate partner so odious. You may want to get a pen and paper, because if you can write out the qualities that make your hate partner so repugnant, you’ll gain tremendous clarity.

  • When you hate, your soul is ready to do some of the deepest work you’ll ever experience. Do yourself and everyone around you a favor: get into a conscious relationship with your hatred and your projections. Don’t repress your hatred, don’t explode with it, and don’t try to erase it by shellacking fraudulent acceptance on top of it.

• FEAR: Intuition & Action

  • ACTION REQUIRED: Fear arises to orient you to change, novelty, or possible physical hazards. Fear focuses on the present moment and your immediate surroundings.

  • GIFTS: Intuition ~ Instinct ~ Focus ~ Clarity ~ Attentiveness ~ Readiness ~ Vigor. Ability to react skillfully to stimuli

  • THE INTERNAL QUESTIONS: What action should be taken?

  • DISCUSSION: What are your reactions to the things we’ve all been taught about fear? Have you ever heard any positive messages about fear? Think about times when your fear has worked well for you.

  • We don’t recognize fear as the innate ability to act, move, react, and change our behavior based on the input we receive. We call fear our horse sense, our gut instincts, our little birdie, or even our guardian angel.

  • When your emotional realm is healthy, your anger and fear work together to keep you safe and sound. However, when your emotional realm is unhealthy, this is almost exactly the way your anger and fear work together: when your boundary is decayed, ignored, and poorly maintained because you don’t honor your anger, your fears will have to become hypervigilant and overly activated just to keep you upright.

  • If you have no boundary, you’ll be unable to monitor your behavior or identify proper behavior in others, and you’ll be vulnerable most of the time. Without a strong boundary, you may experience amorphous anxieties, you may attack people verbally or physically, or accuse them of plotting against you.

  • When your flowing fear is allowed to take its secure and proper position inside your well-defined boundaries, it will bring you an instinctive sense of readiness, focus, calm, and vigor. In fact, you won’t seem fearful at all, just as you won’t appear angry when you set your boundary properly.

  • Fear is not cowardice. It is the protective mechanism inside you that knows you’re not adequately prepared for whatever comes next. When you ask your fear the internal question, What action should be taken. your fear will tell you in no uncertain terms: Stand still. Run! Speak out. Remain silent. Duck! Fade into the background. Walk forcefully. Move quickly to the left. Look stupid.

  • When you can channel your fear properly, it will contribute a sense of self-preservation while it pushes you to study, prepare, and renew your understanding of courage as the capacity to live life on your own terms.

  • Fear is your body’s way of telling you that something is wrong. It helps you know when you’re about to take on a new job, a new love affair, or any new direction in your life.

  • To access your fear, you must ground and focus yourself inside your sacred space. When you have free access to your fear, you’ll tend to be calm and relaxed most of the time because your intuition will be fully activated, which means you’ll be able to avoid unnecessary dangers without much effort.

  • When you allow your fear to instruct your behavior, you may find yourself acting in unaccustomed ways. For example, you may fight back or deal with the situation when you’re actually very gentle. When your life is at stake, your fear will cause you to act in lifesaving ways that might never occur to you in a normal situation.

  • When you can see your flash backs as brilliant survival tools, they can become fun and comical. You can move from a broken-down victim position into a powerful survivor stance. Your fear can contribute an agile, resourceful, and humorous Jackie Chan stance that will help you see yourself in an entirely new light.

  • Fears of the future can be worked with in the same way. If you can preplay fearful events in your mind, you can prepare yourself for any number of win-win scenarios before they happen. Fear knows that this world is full of dangers and novel situations, and it wants to prepare you for them.

  • When dealing with fear in others, it is important to treat them not as weaklings or overly reactive beings, but as intuitive people whose instincts have become activated. If you can shift your attitude, you can help these people connect to their intuitive abilities.

  • When fear is welcomed and respected, it alerts people to danger or novelty, prepares them to act decisively, contributes the energy they need to complete whichever action works best in each situation, and then retreats to its watchful free-flowing state.

  • There are two types of anxiety. The first is a constant sense of dread, wariness, nervousness, and apprehension that arises when we’re clogged with rejected and dishonored fears. The second is a nagging sense of disturbance or distress when you have no precise information to grab hold of.

  • The intuitive and instinctual emotion of fear is a warning signal that needs to be listened to. It can save your life. Worry and anxieties are not always linked to physical danger, but they always try to get your attention for crucial reasons.

• WORRY & ANXIETY: Focus & Completion

  • ACTION REQUIRED: Worry and anxiety arise to help you organize, plan for, and complete your tasks – both are related to fear, but they arise to help you orient to possible upcoming change, novelty, or hazard. Bonus: If you feel anxiety or worry, you’ll know that there is nothing to fear in the present moment!

  • GIFTS: Foresight ~ Focus ~ Conscience ~ Task-completion ~ Procrastination alert!

  • THE INTERNAL QUESTIONS: What triggered this feeling? What truly needs to be done?

  • If you’re constantly anxious, pay attention to your grounding. Connecting yourself to the earth and off-loading your tension is a great way to calm and focus yourself so that you can feel safe. If you struggle with anxiety, you’ll often experience chemical disturbances due to an increase in adrenaline, cortisol, and related hormones.

  • When you’re coming out of an anxiety trance, your personal space can become small and puny in response to your lack of usable instincts. Pouring your anxiety into your personal space will help your body relax and heal itself, but it will also fill your personal space with enough energy to restore itself to its proper size.

  • When people are stuck in the territory of worry and anxiety, they are near their fears but not yet able to work with them consciously. To help them create sacred space for their anxieties, you can support them in tracking their way back to their true fears and their ability to act decisively.

• CONFUSION: The Mask for Fear

  • ACTION REQUIRED: Confusion is a mask for fear and anxiety, and it arises when you are overwhelmed by change, novelty, or too many tasks. Confusion can be a lovely vacation from overwhelm.

  • GIFTS: Diffused awareness ~ Innocence ~ Malleability ~ Taking a time-out

  • THE INTERNAL QUESTIONS: What is my intention? What action should be taken?

  • DISCUSSION: Are there situations or relationships in which you regularly feel confused or indecisive? How might your confusion be protecting you in these situations or relationships?

  • When you’re confused, you’ll find yourself dithering, changing your mind constantly, and being nearly unable to focus or ground yourself. Confusion is a form of dissociation that takes you out of commission when you’ve lost your way. It’s a bit like apathy, which is also a masking state.

  • When you’re confused, ask yourself what your intention is. Don’t focus on which direction you should go in, what choice you should make, or what thing you should do, but on what your intention is. Your confusion will stop you when you’re not following your instincts or your flowing fear.

  • When you’re confused, it’s important to understand that something aware inside you is working on your behalf. If you can stop yourself and reassess your position when your confusion arises, you’ll be able to connect to that awareness and find your way back to the center of your meaningful, whole life.

  • It can be difficult to help others honor their confusion, as you may be tempted to take an incorrect position as the knower of all things and the giver of all answers. Instead, help them honor their need for a time-out and support them in regaining their instincts, decisiveness, and ingenuity.

• JEALOUSY: Relational Radar

  • ACTION REQUIRED: Jealousy arises when your connection to love, mate-retention, or loyalty is threatened.

  • GIFTS: Fairness ~ Commitment ~ Security ~ Connection ~ Loyalty

  • THE INTERNAL QUESTIONS: What has been betrayed? What must be healed and restored?

  • DISCUSSION: What do your jealousy and envy tell you about what you may be missing, wanting, or needing in your life? Karla has said that a great question to ask jealousy and envy in order to help them focus on the entire situation and everyone’s needs is: “What would be fair?”

  • Jealousy and envy are separate emotional states, but they both arise in response to unfaithfulness or deceit in an intimate relationship. They are a mixture of anger and fear, and they attempt to set or restore lost boundaries.

  • Jealousy is a combination of intuition and self-protection that arises in its mood state when your most important relationships are threatened. Intimacy and security in intimate relationships is extremely important to your health and well-being, so much so that you’ll feel physically threatened when you sense betrayal from your mate.

  • If your partner is unreliable, or your position as the primary focus of your partner is threatened, your jealousy will be a natural and healthy response. However, if you don’t listen to and honor your jealousy, it will tend to drag you into a feedback loop that can make your life uncomfortable.

  • Jealousy is a form of anger that you’ve been holding onto, and it’s time to let it go and channel it into your boundary. Channeling your jealousy into your boundary will help strengthen it, and then you can address your shock and diminishment with renewed strength.

  • When you’re done with your jealousy, thank it and let it know it’s welcome in the future to help you choose, maintain, and watch over the most important relationships in your life.

  • Jealousy is a common emotion, and while it may be difficult to deal with, it is not disordered. It is your job to restore your boundaries, intuition, and ability to choose devoted relationships, not to forever rid yourself of the healing force of jealousy.

  • If you can help people honor and listen to their jealousy, you’ll perform a great healing service. If you try to argue or shame people out of their jealousy, you’ll disable their instincts and their boundaries.

• ENVY: Interactional Radar

  • ACTION REQUIRED: Envy arises when your connection to material security, resources, or recognition is threatened.

  • GIFTS: Fairness ~ Security ~ Access to resources ~ Proper recognition ~ Self-preservation

  • THE INTERNAL QUESTIONS: What has been betrayed? What must be made right?

  • Envy is similar to jealousy in that it is a mixture of boundary-restoring anger and intuitive fear. It alerts you to the risks to your position and security in your social group, but it does so in connection to the fair and equitable distribution of resources and recognition, rather than threats to your reproductive survival.

  • Envy is a powerful emotion that can lead to the destruction of your boundaries, your intuition, and your effectiveness. It is easy to see why envy has such a bad reputation.

  • Envy, when properly honored and channeled, helps you understand social structures and work within them or leave them behind if you cannot work within them. It gives you the internal security and intuition you need to meet and respond to the many threats and sudden changes you’ll experience in your quest for resources.

  • When you can accept the intense anger inside envy and move it out of your body, you’ll be able to calm yourself enough to focus and access the intuition envy carries with it. When you can treat your behaviors as strategies, you’ll be able to explore and amend them in favor of newer strategies that may fit into your present-day social situation in more advantageous ways.

  • When you’re done with the exercise, bless your envy and place it in your emotional realm. It will give you the inner strength and awareness you need to observe and even celebrate the gains and recognitions of others while you nurture your own connections to resources, social support, and recognition.

  • If you are still stuck on envy, you may need to see a therapist. envy is a powerful emotion, and it can throw you into the rapids if you aren’t careful. It can also be caused by a childhood that twisted your envy into greed.

  • Envy is the emotion that arises in response to a threat to your social standing and resources. It can be difficult to work with, because it often goes along with shame, which many people have difficulty dealing with.

• PANIC AND TERROR: Frozen Fire

  • ACTION REQUIRED: Panic and terror arise when your physical life is directly and immediately threatened. You have three choices: Fight, flee, or freeze.

  • GIFTS: Sudden energy ~ Fixed attention ~ Absolute stillness ~ Healing from trauma

  • THE INTERNAL QUESTIONS (during the emergency): Just listen to your body – don’t think, just react. Your body is a survival expert, and it will keep you safe.

  • THE INTERNAL QUESTIONS (for PTSD): What has been frozen in time? What healing action must be taken?

  • DISCUSSION: Panic and terror arise to literally save your life. Have there been times where you’ve experienced the lifesaving gifts of panic or terror? If you’d like to share with the group, please be careful to tell your story in a non-dramatic way so that you don’t overwhelm your group mates. For instance, don’t get into gory details – just note the traumatic incident (i.e., car crash, injury, betrayal), and focus on which of the three responses your panic selected to save your life: fight, flee, or freeze.

  • Freezing is a response that helps us survive dangerous or traumatizing situations. It can dull our senses to excruciating pain, protect us from overwhelming stimuli, and present a corpselike demeanor to our attackers. However, in the aftermath of panic and terror, there’s so much activation that it’s difficult to revisit, renegotiate, and integrate the situation.

  • If you can’t track your panic attacks back to a trauma, it may be because we train ourselves to ignore and dissociate from our thoughts, emotions, dreams, and even our physical sensations. If you’re a sensitive person and you’ve become dissociated in response to this relentless assault, your psyche will need to revisit each instance of dissociation in order to help you reintegrate yourself and come back to life.

  • When your terror and panic are activated in response to trauma, they move forward to increase your adrenaline in case you have the chance to fight or flee at any time during your ordeal. They help you freeze and release heightened amounts of painkilling endorphins so you’ll be more likely to survive any injury.

  • If you’re being treated for panic attacks, you should focus on your grounding skills so that you can release some of the activated energy that’s trapped in your body. You should also avoid stimulants, which will help you calm and heal your overworked adrenals.

  • When you’re in the territory of panic, you may have a lot of energy stored in your body. Before you enter a flashback, it’s helpful to pour this energy into your boundaries and your personal space. This helps you calm your body and revitalize your boundary.

  • After you’ve worked through a panic cycle, it’s important to refill yourself consciously. This will help your stasis tendencies refill you in the way they usually do, which is not always consciously. You must refill yourself consciously so that your movements into stasis are as conscious as your movements into change.

• SADNESS: The Water Bearer

  • ACTION REQUIRED: Sadness arises when it’s time to let go of something that isn’t working anyway. If you can truly let go, relaxation and rejuvenation will surely follow.

  • GIFTS: Release ~ Fluidity ~ Grounding ~ Relaxation ~ Rejuvenation

  • THE INTERNAL QUESTIONS: What must be released? What must be rejuvenated?

  • DISCUSSION: Do you welcome your sadness and give it the time it needs to ground you and help you let go of things that no longer serve you? Or do you try to avoid, repress, or rush through sadness – so that it never has the chance to bring relaxation and rejuvenation to you?

  • Sadness is your psyche’s water-bearer. It helps you slow down and feel your losses, and it helps you release what needs to be released. It helps you trust in the flow of time, in the surprising flow of vision and inspiration, and in the ebb and flow of human relationships.

  • When you move into the softened releasing posture of sadness, you can uncouple yourself from the ideas, situations, or people you’ve outgrown or whom you attached to with improper intent. Sadness moves forward to question your outdated or hollow attachments in a slow and persistent manner, and it asks you to release them back into the flow of life.

  • When your anger and your sadness are harmonized in your psyche, they can help you release outworn ideas or unworkable relationships while you restore your authentic purpose. When you release dead weight and restore yourself to a focused and upright position, you’ll feel rejuvenated and wiser.

  • Your anger will protect you from experiencing your sadness unless you’re safe enough to do so. Your anger knows that sadness is real soul-work, and it won’t allow you to move into it until you’re safe enough to do so.

  • When you can dance with your anger and sadness, you won’t second-guess or wrestle with any anger that arises in front of your sadness. You’ll realize that anger actually exists to strengthen you when your boundary and self-image are challenged.

  • People who lead with sadness are often children of raging or addicted parents. They have experienced firsthand the horrors committed in the name of anger, and as a result, they have completely dropped their anger. However, this is not a condition, but a choice.

  • People who lead with sadness often struggle with physical and emotional instability, cycling depressions and anxieties, unworkable relationships, and excruciating loneliness. They must realize that leading with their survival skills instead of their authentic emotions ensures that they will remain in survival mode.

  • The practice for sadness is simple: you just stop, drop into yourself, and set your boundary strongly as you ask the internal questions, What must be released. and What must be rejuvenated. Sadness brings incredible healing energies with it.

  • When you’re inflexible and desiccated, you need to bring flow and relaxation back to your life. When you’re tense and stagnant, you must move toward joy and happiness, which cannot and will not heal you. When you require deep relaxation and deep release, you must move honorably and meaningfully into sadness.

  • When we encounter sadness, we usually try to make the person around us smile. However, very few people are given the time or permission to feel truly sad. We dry their tears, hug them, and make jokes.

  • Sadness is a natural emotion that helps you deal with specific situations, and it helps you rejuvenate and renew before moving on. However, if you can ask your body to don the posture of despair, you’ll immediately feel the difference between it and sadness.

  • When your sadness is trapped, your mind and body will become clogged, and you’ll probably dissociate to get away from the whole mess. When you can break through despair and restore your flow, you’ll be able to live again.

• GRIEF: The Deep River of the Soul

  • ACTION REQUIRED: Grief arises when something has been lost irretrievably or when someone has died.

  • GIFTS: If you can’t move into your grief, you’ll only experience destabilization and dissociation in response to the shock of loss, injustice, inequity, and death, instead of being cleansed and renewed in the river of all souls

  • THE INTERNAL QUESTIONS: What must be mourned? What must be released completely?

  • DISCUSSION: Grief is not openly supported by most people, except in funeral rituals. However, funerals can be stilted, shallow, or too rushed to allow people to grieve fully. As you think back to a recent death or loss, were you able to grieve fully? Or is your grief still lingering and waiting to support you in utterly letting go?

  • Grief is a beautiful, languid, and powerful emotion that arises when death occurs. It drops you into the river of all souls, and it transports you to the deepest places when you have no choice but to let go.

  • Grief is the deep river of the soul. It is the fully resourced village that incorporates and integrates our bodies, all of our emotions, all of our multiple intelligences, and all of our dreams and visions.

  • We can’t escape our grief by numbing ourselves to pain and horror with violent entertainment. When we take off our armor and wade into the waters of grief, we’ll discover our sacred position in the dance of all souls.

  • We humans have a great deal of primal wisdom about grief because there is a greater preponderance of primal wisdom inside our brains than there is intellectual information. We can access this wisdom through ritual.

  • When you move through your grief, you may feel a tremendous weight upon you. If you can remember that the movement required in grief is downward, you’ll understand the necessity of this heaviness, which anchors you and presses you into your body so that you can feel the weight and the depth of the situation.

  • If your grief is stuck simply because it is unfinished, walking yourself through the ritual practice for grief will help you complete your grieving process. Grieving takes its own time, and it won’t leave you until you perform your sacred tasks.

  • The first rule for creating sacred space for grief is not to rush in and pull the mourner out of the river. Grieving people need to be treated as sacred vessels through which the river of life is flowing in all its power and all its beauty.

  • When your grieving process is complete, you should wrap up the shrine and transport your dead into the next world. Then, you should dismantle your shrine and place the photos and items in new configurations. Remember to include your ancestors in your life by talking or singing to them, asking them questions, or praying to them.

• SITUATIONAL DEPRESSION: Ingenious Stagnation

  • ACTION REQUIRED: Situational depression arises when some aspect of your life is unworkable or dysfunctional; depression stops you for a vital reason.

  • GIFTS: The Ingenious Stop Sign of the Soul

  • THE INTERNAL QUESTIONS: Where has my energy gone? Why was it sent away?

    • Important note: Please study the different forms of depression on pages 328-330 in The Language of Emotions; many require therapeutic and/or medical intervention.

  • DISCUSSION: Karla makes a distinction between situational depression and the more serious forms of depression (see pages 329-330). If you have worked with your own situational depression (which restricts your energy for important reasons), what did you find to be helpful? What didn’t work?

  • Depression is a constellation of emotions, postures, decisions, and health issues that erect what I call the brilliant stop sign of the soul. It is important to understand the difference between despair, which arises when your natural sadness has become blocked or trapped, and depression, which is a cyclical and unresolving movement through any number of blocked or overemphasized emotions.

  • untreated depressions can lead to brain damage, so it is important to get help. They can also lead to cycling anxieties, phobias, or OCD symptoms, which require a different form of treatment.

  • situational depression is the form of depression most of us experience. It is when we feel down and sad about specific events, but not about everything. It is easily treated with the depression practice in this chapter.

  • Situational depression is a rapids-level emotion that arises when we disconnect our elements and intelligences from one another. It is a protective and self-respecting response to the internal, familial, social, financial, and political decay and injustice we face every day.

  • I took 20 years to address my depression, and when I finally did, I was surprised to find that it wasn’t attacking me, but sending parts of my soul away to safety. I realized that my depression was simply trying to save my life.

  • Your soul’s task isn’t to erase your depression and keep walking; it is to understand your necessary movement into stagnation and address your depression as a peer instead of a combatant. Your sacred task is to end the war between your elements, clear away the rubble, and make a home that the children of your soul would want to come back to.

  • When you’re in a depression, it’s difficult to focus on anything because your depression sucks all your energy away. The first movement of depression is a postural change, and it’s important to listen to your depression and bow your head. In most cases, one or both of your airy logic and your fiery vision will tend to dominate, which will throw your earthy body and watery emotions into disarray.

  • When you can ground and integrate yourself, you’ll be able to differentiate between the many emotional states trapped inside your depression. You’ll be able to feel the difference between sadness and despair, between grief and world-weariness, between anxiety and healthy fear, and between apathy and an urge to suicide.

  • The key to coming out of a depressive spiral is to treat activity and rest as equally important things. If you’re depressed and inactive, you should begin exercising gently and work your way back to fitness.

  • Sleep is also important for your emotional and physical health, and many studies have shown that sleep disruptions and sleep deprivation contribute to depression and hormonal and chemical imbalances.

  • Depression is a result of an internal imbalance that diminishes your emotional agility and your ability to feel any emotion properly. It steps in when your intellect and your emotions are at each other’s throats, when you fly over your emotions and batter them with logic, or when your body trammels toward meeting its needs for food, sex, and more stuff without any emotional, spiritual, or logical considerations.

  • Depression is not caused by simply being unhappy, but by fighting an exhausting battle that impedes your ability to act conscientiously. If you were to simply add more happiness to your system, your actions would be damaging to you and everyone around you.

  • When you’re in the midst of depression, it’s hard to believe that anything can be done to help the world become a better place. But when you take your depression personally enough to get to work, you’ll begin to alleviate your own depression, and the trouble in our culture will begin to ease.

  • It is important to distinguish between depression that is actually stuck, and depression that isn’t quite through yet because you’ve still got imbalances to deal with. If you’re meeting your depression in as many ways as you can, but it just won’t move at all, see a doctor or therapist.

  • Depression is a serious and life-threatening illness, and it’s important to recognize that people with depression may not be able to handle your help. Remember to welcome your depression as a signal of imbalance in your separate elements and intelligences.

• SUICIDAL URGES

  • ACTION REQUIRED: when suicidal urges arise, it can mean that something integral to your identity (an idea, a behavior, a relationship, a job, etc.) has become intolerable and needs to end completely – to die. However, you don’t need to die. We need you here!.

  • GIFTS: energy to wrench yourself bodily, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually out of a situation that is killing you already

  • THE INTERNAL STATEMENT: What idea or behavior must end now? What can no longer be tolerated in my soul?

  • DISCUSSION: If you feel comfortable with the subject, share a situation in which you felt suicidal urges. Since you survived, what helped you? Were you able to identify the intolerable situation that needed to end?

  • If you’ve turned to this chapter after gathering your skills in all the emotions leading up to this one, you’re ready to approach suicidal urges. They should only be approached when you’re comfortable inside your vibrantly blazing boundary and have access to therapeutic support.

  • The last resort of a soul in torment is to suicide, when your brain chemistry or untreated sleep disorders have thoroughly destabilized you. Suicidal urges arise when your fears have been overwhelmed, your angers have been crushed, your boundaries have been trampled, and you’ve been separated from your sadness and grief.

  • When you can dive into panic, you’ll find incredible power and limitless courage inside it. The same is true of the suicidal urge. When you ask prayerfully what must end and what can no longer be tolerated in your soul, the force inside your suicidal urge will help you perform some of the deepest soul-work you’ll ever experience.

  • Suicidal urges are not dangerous if you can channel them honorably. They can even comfort you with thoughts of escaping the cruelties of this world and falling into a never-ending sleep. However, the reality of suicide is a complete disaster.

  • Channeling suicidal urges is a complicated process that involves setting a strong boundary, focusing yourself, and then diving into the feelings you’ve been avoiding for so long. It can be a roller-coaster ride, but it gets easier after that.

  • I asked my suicidal urge to come forward, and I felt some darkness, some depression, and some sadness. I then projected dark colors, a watery blue sadness, and a gray depressed feeling into my personal space.

  • I had to prepare for the difficult stage work ahead of me by dealing with my suicidal urge. I learned that each of my emotions was trying to help me prepare for the stage work, and I understood them better as a result.

  • When you’re ready to work with your own suicidal urges, you should fire up your boundary and intensify your grounding. Suicidal urges travel with many trapped emotions and traumatic memories, so you should prepare yourself for their intensity by becoming proficient in each of your empathic skills.

  • When a suicidal urge arises, it brings you the ferocity you need to rescue your soul from hell. Don’t repress your suicidal emotions – use them to destroy your contracts.

  • After channeling a suicidal urge, you’ll be in a very different place, and you may have a new soul assignment. The channeling of this urge always reconnects you to your dreams and your innate intelligences. With its blessing, you’ll have new information about which elements or intelligences need to be revitalized and integrated.

  • It is important to understand that suicidal urges are not just literal wishes for death, but signs that something inside you is already threatening your life. Suicidal urges are the darkness before dawn, and it is important to let them have their kill in a sacred, empathic way.

• HAPPINESS: Anticipation & Possibility

  • ACTION REQUIRED: Happiness arises to help you look forward to the future with hope and delight.

  • GIFTS: Merriment ~ Gaiety ~ Amusement ~ Hope ~ Delight ~ Wonder ~ Playfulness ~ Invigoration

  • THE INTERNAL STATEMENT: Thank you for this lively celebration!

  • DISCUSSION: It’s difficult to achieve a balanced relationship with happiness in a culture that chases after it as if it’s a prize. Do you allow your happiness to flow and recede freely, in its own way and in its own time, or have you been taught to chase after it and never let it go? What is your relationship with your happiness?

  • Happiness is the most dangerous emotion, not in and of itself, but because of the way we behave in relation to it. We chase after it, sell our souls for it, and try to cement ourselves into its territory. This exploitation of happiness jeopardizes us because when we refuse to honor any emotion except happiness, our emotional landscapes become stagnant and unbalanced.

  • Happiness is a difficult emotion for many of us to grasp because it is often paired with the word idiot in some form or fashion. But happiness isn’t ignorance or foolishness; it holds our sense of wonder and anticipation of good things.

  • When happiness arises naturally, you should laugh, goof, smile, and dream. Then you should flow into your next task or emotion. If you try to imprison your happiness, you’ll spiral into a forced gaiety that will deaden your entire emotional realm.

  • The practice for all of the happiness-based emotions is simple and infinitely difficult: you acknowledge them, thank them, and then let them go completely. If you force your contentment to be your leading emotional state, you’ll lose your way in a split second.

• CONTENTMENT: Pleasure & Appreciation

  • ACTION REQUIRED: Contentment arises to help you look toward yourself with pride and satisfaction.

  • GIFTS: Enjoyment ~ Satisfaction ~ Self-esteem ~ Renewal ~ Confidence ~ Fulfillment

  • THE INTERNAL STATEMENT: Thank you for renewing my faith in myself!

  • DISCUSSION: When was the last time you felt content with yourself? Do you allow yourself to feel and enjoy contentment when you’ve done well or accomplished something? If not, how can you give yourself more credit when it’s due?

  • Contentment is the act of meeting your own expectations and internal moral code, and it arises after an important goal has been accomplished. It comes forward in response to tangible actions and the mastery of clear-cut challenges.

• JOY: Affinity & Communion

  • ACTION REQUIRED: Joy arises to help you feel a blissful sense of expansiveness and connection to others, to ideas, or to experiences.

  • GIFTS: Expansion ~ Communion ~ Inspiration ~ Splendor ~ Radiance ~ Bliss

  • THE INTERNAL STATEMENT: Thank you for this radiant moment! Be aware: Extreme joy (exhilaration) is a state to approach with care, especially if it cycles with depression or sadness. Repetitive exhilaration or flights of giddy mania may be a sign of emotional dysregulation; please reach out for help.

  • DISCUSSION: Have you ever become too attached to the experience of joy and tried to hold on to it or force it to arise in place of another emotion or experience? If so, how can you develop a more appropriate and empathic relationship with your joy?

  • Joy is the trickiest and most dangerous of all the happiness-based emotions. It is treated as an orgasmic emotional state, which means that people spend a lot of time working toward it as a goal instead of living consciously and appropriately in relation to it.

  • Joy is a natural human emotion that arises after you’ve come to the end of a long and difficult path. It is not a magical gift from the cosmos, but an emotion that arises when you perform your rejuvenation practice.

  • You can use joy to rejuvenate yourself. It arises naturally when you’ve done honest and strenuous work to arrive at a place of communion with all parts of yourself and the world. Your grounding and integrating task when joy arises is to remind yourself that the hard work is just as beautiful and meaningful as the joy.

  • When you are around people who are imbued with happiness, contentment, or joy, do not interfere with them. Instead, simply enjoy them. This can be difficult if your own relationship with any of these emotions is skewed.

  • True happiness, contentment, and joy bring delight into your conscious awareness if you treat each one respectfully. If you try to paste a haunted smile onto your face and throw yourself into a nightmare of never-ending exhilaration, you’ll destabilize every part of yourself.

  • If you’ve been trying to stay in exhilaration, joy, or whatever they’re calling it this year, don’t be surprised if you’re completely unable to focus. Your healing practice for this territory is the same as the practice for people trapped in depression, because both exhilaration and depression spring from quaternal imbalance, emotional suppression, and avoidance behaviors.

Questions/Discussions/Exercises

• Were you hyper-empathic as a child? Did you find animal friends or any other support for your sensitivity and empathic awareness?

• Dissociation (the sense that you are separate from your body or the current situation) is an ability we all have. For instance, you dissociate naturally when you day dream. Have you experienced situations in which dissociation was helpful to you?

• Have you experienced a sea change in your life, where you realized that you had been mistaken, or that you had been involved in something that no longer felt right? How did you become aware of your need to change?

• Think of times when you’ve been told that you were too emotional, or when you felt uncomfortable feeling or expressing emotions in the presence of others. Feel free to share these experiences and talk about how you handled these situations

• Think about how you work with your emotions now. Do you express them openly with other people or through activities, or do you repress most of them and keep them inside?

• 3 empathic exercises (pg 33-36). Each of these exercises intentionally engages with an emotion in its most subtle form. These exercises can help you learn to feel, identify, and befriend your emotions as key aspects of your intelligence, awareness, and social skills – rather than treat them as unwanted things that “happen” to you

• Karla describes emotions in the different intensity levels of “…their flowing states, their mood-states, and … their “raging rapids” states” (pg. 37). In the exercises above, you experienced the soft and flowing states of sadness, happiness, and fear. Had you ever connected these states to the subtle levels of emotions they contain?

• Share your ideas about how the quaternity model relates to you. What elements are strongest for you right now – and what elements could you integrate into your life more fully?

• What are your judgments about healthy judgment? Share instances where healthy judgments can and should be made. How can healthy judgment support your emotional awareness?

• Think about ways that your intellect has overtaken or bullied your emotions into submission. What are ways that you can help your intellect and emotions work together as a team?

• Do you find that you already gravitate to practices that support just one or two of your elements? Share ways that you can make room in your daily life for your neglected elements (if any).

• What would it feel like to begin balancing your elements? Are there relationships that would have to change as you grow and develop into a fifth-element personality?

• If you’re comfortable, share some of the ways you use addictions and distractions currently. What do these practices bring to your life? How do they support you? How do they hinder you?

• If you’re comfortable, share some of the roots of your addictive or distracting behaviors. What are some of the ways you can shift these behaviors and start feeling the emotions hiding behind them?

• Can you track Mr. Bunny through our culture? Are there shared practices, traditions, recreational activities, or accepted behaviors that are actually some form of Mr. Bunny?

• If you feel comfortable sharing, what are the dissociative practices you might use to deal with trauma? If the group would like to explore this topic more deeply, you can discuss the rest of the chapter and, specifically,the three responses to trauma on pages 95-98, and the three stages of trauma and initiation on pages

• If your group is comfortable, you can talk about any repetitive emotions that are trying to get your attention. What gifts and awareness are these emotions trying to bring to you?

• Whether you’ve survived trauma or not, have you experienced the healthy, boundary-restoring aspects of your anger and the intuitive and instinctual aspects of your fear?

• What have you been told about forgiveness? Does your current concept of forgiveness include healthy anger, as it should? If not, how can you can responsibly channel your anger and work with forgiveness in a healthy and empathic way?

• Have you experienced deep and lasting love – such as the healthy love of a parent and child, or the dedicated and adoring love of a pet? How is that type of love different from the volatility of romantic love and crushes?

• Try out this practice as a group and share what it feels like to ground yourself. Is this grounded state natural for you, or does it feel very unusual?

• Would you like to burn any of the old contracts you’ve made with yourself or others? Are there old behaviors that feel entrapping, or that you’d like to change? If you’ve already tried this practice on your own, share your experiences with the group.

• Discuss the difference between Conscious Complaining and positive affirmations (see pages 149-151). If you’ve already tried this practice on your own, share your experiences with the group.

• What rejuvenates you and brings you a sense of calm and renewal? Do you have any regular rejuvenation practices now?

• Before delving into the emotions one by one, are there any emotions that you’d like to understand better or integrate more fully? Also, which emotions do you have a healthy relationship with right now?

• Think about how often you use the word “stress” or “stressed out” to describe any number of emotions – and think about how you can begin to use the actual names of your real emotions.

Quotes

The primary rule of emotional flow is this: All emotions are true. All emotions tell the absolute truth, either about the specific situation that brought the emotion into play, or about some area of the psyche…. All emotions are true. This doesn’t mean that all emotions are right or that you should take their word for everything!… Some of your emotional reactions can display prejudices you didn’t know you had, while others can make you lust after things that would damage you; therefore, you don’t just follow your emotions like a fool…. Your task is to welcome that truth and support your emotional flow by bringing a full village of perspectives to each of your emotions.

Emotions are necessary – even when they’re uncomfortable or socially inappropriate – because they are part of your psyche, a part of your neural network, a part of your socialization, and a part of your humanity

Emotions are a source of great resourcefulness. If you can learn to focus and work with the information inside each of your emotion states, you can become intimately connected to the source of your intelligence and heal your most profound wounds.

Empathy is a powerful tool that can help us understand others, but it can also be a double-edged sword. While empaths are very sensitive and intuitive, they can also get right to the center of any issue, but in a culture that can’t figure out what emotions are, empaths are difficult to understand. I missed the important early stage of turning off my preverbal empathic skills in order to develop the verbal skills of emotional subterfuge. As a result, I could not listen to the dangerous ideas surrounding emotions and accept them. I had to find my own way. Empathic skills allow us to see the world as alive with knowledge and meaning. They help us listen to the meaning underneath words, understand living things and nature, and connect with the world around us. When we look at things empathically, we drop down underneath the obvious, behind the merely rational, and beneath the surface of what seems to be going on. We must learn to listen to our emotions in order to use them properly.

My family was a mix of intellectual, linguistic, musical, mathematical, and artistic genius. We always had a comfortable relationship with the idea of genius. None of us could envision an emotional person as a genius.

I was a very empathetic child, and I could sense what others were feeling even if they didn’t want me to. I could blurt out the true words, point to the actual situation under the social banter, and find the absurdity beneath the seeming normality.

I spent a lot of time with my cat Tommy Tiger, and I began to see the world through his eyes. I could feel his full-body experience of lounging on a soft lawn in a puddle of sunshine, and I understood where he was growling at the neighborhood dogs who had no manners.

I had the security and quiet I needed to think about humans and their bizarre behaviors. I began to empathize with them, and came to view humankind and human interactions in a different way.

My empathic skills were an ingenious survival response. I experienced the emotions of others as if they were my own, and I endured full-body contact with others that made me see and feel their emotions as if they were real, physical things.

I had no social or sensory filters, and I was constantly perceiving and feeling people’s emotions. I was just on fire most of the time. I tried to process all the emotional content, but I worked almost completely in the dark because I didn’t know how to explain my perceptions to others.

Dissociation is a natural response to overwhelming stimuli, but for many traumatized people, the tangent goes on and on. They have little connection to life in the everyday world. I could leave the world of suffering behind when I dissociated. I felt a sense of lightness and peace, and I met angels and guides who lived in an alternate, deeply meaningful spiritual world just beside this one. I became known as the animal girl, and I would go up to fierce dogs and pet them. I learned to be quieter and more still, and I let the living or the dying happen on its own. I learned to be calm and patient.

Many forms of spiritualism and metaphysics exert a strong pull on dissociated trauma survivors, who form a significant part of our population. Dissociative, out-of-body spiritual practices can be very attractive to trauma survivors.

I learned how to help people get reassociated into their bodies, and I focused on that aspect of my healing practice. I knew what to do, it was the same process as with traumatized cats, dogs, and birds. I created a safe, warm, and quiet environment, and I stayed with people until they were reintegrated.

I learned that emotions are extremely versatile and healing. They help us survive and navigate our way through life. They are fluid, ever-changing, and they carry massive amounts of information with them.

We must bring all parts of ourselves to the process of healing ourselves and others, or any important process. When we can stand balanced and upright at the center of our lives, we won’t be just intelligent about emotions, but also inquiring explorers who can bring new awareness to their deepest issues.

There are good emotions and bad emotions, and they are usually taught to us from a young age. Good emotions are happiness, pleasantness, joy, and some forms of sadness. Bad emotions are sadness that lasts too long, depression, anger, peevishness, righteous indignation, wrath, and rage.

Emotions are a very important part of our lives, and we should treat them that way. They are not good or bad, but rather a rich and brilliant continuum of emotions.

Emotions are a part of your psyche, a part of your neural network, and a part of your socialization. They are not the enemy, but they have come to be vilified because empathic awareness is so uncommon.

Empathic work teaches us to find the middle ground between vilifying and glorifying our emotions, and between expressing and repressing them. When we can see all of our emotions as vital tools, we can invite them into a conscious and supportive dialogue.

When we express our emotions, we hand them over to the outside world, where we hope they’ll be noticed, honored, and transformed. But emotional expression can make us dependent on external action, books, friends, and family. If these external supports are not available to us, we might not be able to process our feelings. We must learn to honor and attend to our emotions in a deeper, more mature, and more evolved way. We must learn not to work against the emotions with repression or for the emotions with incompetent expression.

When you can channel your emotions, you’ll discover that each of your emotions contains vital skills and abilities that help you survive and thrive. Your emotions don’t disappear when you’re not feeling them; instead, they move through you at all times.

Sadness is an internal emotion that brings you back to yourself and makes you aware of your interior state. It helps you release uncomfortable things you’ve been grasping on to, like muscle tension, fatigue, lost hopes, or disappointments.

When you smile, you can bring your happiness forward and share it with others. Happiness is a good emotion to share with others if it’s the right time to be happy. It’s also an emotion that tends to arise naturally when you’ve done good work with some of your deeper emotions.

Fear is your instincts and intuition, and it helps you focus on your internal knowledge and your surroundings. It helps you stand upright in your body and lean forward a bit, to bring your instincts and intuition to the moment. We need to be able to identify our emotions, understand them, and begin to communicate with them empathically instead of being at their mercy or treating them cruelly. We must look deeply into accepted wisdom about the emotions and clear away the nonsense that threatens to stupefy us all.

Empathy is a normal human skill that allows us to read the interior state, intentions, emotions, desires, and possible actions of other people or animals. It is one of the multiple kinds of intelligence we have.

Empaths are often thought of as being only logical and spatial, but these are not the only forms of intelligence. Empaths are also linguistic, bodily, and artistic. They are able to access all of their intelligences, but they may not receive direct instruction in regard to their emotions, interpersonal skills, or intrapersonal skills.

We were never taught how to identify our emotions or work with them effectively. We were instead taught to act out our anger and sadness, which would take us out of the normal school day and make us targets for the other kids.

The four-element theory is a way to understand the world that was developed to help us understand the emotions. It is not a scientific one, but it is a mythological and poetic framework that helps us understand the world.

If you can allow your emotions to flow as water does, and if you can respond to them honorably, you can create balance within yourself. Allowing your emotions to flow naturally is the foundation of the ability to channel emotions properly and skillfully.

When you welcome and attend to your fear and anger, they won’t endanger you or the other driver. They’ll simply help you increase your awareness and skill. When you allow your emotions to flow freely, they bring life-affirming water and empathic awareness into your life.

The four-element model helps us understand how our lives function or malfunction when any element is out of balance. We must balance our emotions if we want to experience them in brilliant ways.

If we want to be able to rely on our physical skills when emotions arise, we must know how our emotions and our body interrelate. If we want to be able to think quickly and process our emotions intelligently, we must understand the ideas we have about our emotions and our intellect.

The idea that judgment stops you from experiencing life fully is false. Judgment is the ability to react as an individual and use your discerning intelligence freely. We need to rescue our much-wronged ability to judge and bring it back to a place of honor at the center of our lives.

Healthy judgment is a combination of your airy intellect and your watery emotions coming together to form a considered opinion. It helps you define yourself in the world and separate the wheat from the chaff. This process of definition keeps you focused and centered. It’s an internal decision-making process about what a thing is and whether it suits you or not…. Thoughts and emotions are partners. They’re not enemies.

The intellect is extremely important and useful, but it was never meant to perform the Herculean tasks we’ve forced upon it in our airy, logical-intelligence-only society. We must understand the interplay between the intellect and the other three elements in the quaternity.

A functional quaternity helps us understand and deal with our emotions. When our emotional state is named and understood intellectually, we can work with it properly. When our logical intelligences and our emotional intelligences can work together, we become able to feel and think about things consciously.

When the body and spirit are at odds, and the portaging abilities of the emotions are ignored by both, the intellect will often take a forward position in our psyches. When there is no communication between the elements, and the intellect is forced to take a forward position, we’ll think too much.

If you could get a sense for each job, you’d have a clearer sense of which one made more sense for you. Your emotions could help you feel the difference between the two jobs and the two towns, and this would help your body feel the visceral differences between them.

When you can balance your four elements, your intellect will be able to work together with your emotions. When you can allow your emotions to flow, you’ll free your beleaguered intellect from the impossible task of ruling your entire life without support.

To work with your emotions empathically, you must bring all parts of yourself into the process and into balance. Bringing balance to your system means welcoming each of your elements and intelligences into the whole of your psyche.

Understanding the function of each of your elements helps you self-diagnose your personal imbalances. If you can’t get things done, if you dream or wish for things you can never make happen in this world, then you’ll know your earth element is being neglected. If you can’t figure things out and nothing makes sense, you’ll know your air element isn’t being allowed to take its place.

If your earth element is out of balance, you should move into physical activity, nutrition, and rest. Restoring balance to your earth element means bringing your physical life into consciousness by allowing your body to build, feel, explore, and create.

If your logical air element is gusting like crazy, you should move into conscious mental activity. Study, read, learn a language, or research things that interest you. If you don’t like to read and research, you can do puzzles, play games, or crunch numbers.

If your water element is overflowing, you should move into conscious expressive activity. Anything that releases feelings through your body or your mind will help bring your water element back into balance.

If your fire element is raging or dampened, you should move into conscious spiritual or contemplative activity and make room for dreams, intuitions, and visions in your everyday life. Religious observance and meditation can be healing for some, but you’ll also find spiritual healing in nature walks, time spent with animals, children, and elders, and any time spent by a body of water.

When you can bring your emotional aspects, your intellectual gifts, your bodily skills and strengths, and your visionary spirit into respectful peer relationships, you’ll be able to dance in the realm of brilliance. When the five elements are in balance, a new element arises: nature, wood, or ether in various wisdom traditions.

When you live in an unbalanced quaternity, you’ll consistently forget to act or think or feel or dream. Your personality will be alternately flat or spiky, your ego will swing between utter dejection and utter inflation, and your self-esteem will careen wildly between ungrounded highs and unrealistic lows. But when you can access the grounding and balancing properties of each of your elements and intelligences, you’ll have a stable foundation and a home.

It can be a painfully lonely time when you first start to balance your quaternity. You’ll gain immeasurable freedom when you break free from systems and mindsets that keep you blindfolded and hobbled, but you’ll leave many friends and acquaintances behind you.

The emotions live in an element we don’t value and in intelligences we don’t exercise consciously. Moving into the realm of the emotions means moving away from the status quo. If you need support in letting go of old ways of being, repeat the free-flowing sadness exercise in section four.

Navigating is a great example of how the five elements work together. It requires strong logical knowledge of tides and star positions, as well as the ability to fully plot the voyage, but it also relies on earthy strength and competence in canoeing and sailing.

When we attempt great or new things, we require great resources inside ourselves. We must have strong checks and balances in our psyches so we don’t become confused in the presence of flow. When we can rely equally on all of our elements and intelligences, we’ll have full and conscious access to everything we need to make decisions and strong movements.

The five elements and their intelligences play a big role in emotions. When you’re asking big questions or attempting big things, you need a big, strong, and balanced center from which to process all the information you gather.

The balancing tasks are simple in and of themselves, but the process of restoring your psyche to wholeness can be a hurdle. It is easy to become distracted by your balancing practices, and fall into the trap of using them instead of the skills and abilities they represent.

Your fully resourced personality can help you remain whole even when trouble is present. When you’re whole, you can weather the hard times and the harsh places because you’ll have a functional and multifaceted nature self at the center of your psyche.

When we don’t have a conscious and deliberate relationship with our free-flowing emotions, we won’t understand the necessity of flow. We fight the idea of flow, and instead try to live in a benumbed version of peace and quiet as tension builds up inside us.

When we assume that flow and emotions are a problem, we’ll start problem-solving and end up with a solution based on our assumption that flow and emotions equal trouble and disease. But when we instead accept our flowing emotions as necessary and irreplaceable, we won’t need to solve problems.

Moving toward balance means moving away from distractions, addictions, and avoidance behaviors. However, that movement is uncommon, because distractions are everywhere. We all distract ourselves on a daily basis.

Moving away from distractions, addictions, and avoidance behaviors means moving away from our utterly distracted society and into our own keeping. This can be difficult, but it helps to understand why we all distract ourselves so much of the time.

We reach out for addictions and distractions not because we’re weak or unprincipled, but because something is seriously amiss inside us. When we can observe avoidance, distraction, and addiction from an empathic perspective, we can understand what sorts of relief they give us.

The brain dopers, by forcing their minds to maintain constant focus, are actually reducing their intellectual capacities. The anesthetics, painkillers, cigarettes, heroin, marijuana, excessive reading or TV and movie viewing, and overeating numb the body, the emotions, and the thoughts so that part of us can live in peace and quiet. When we can nurture the village of elements and intelligences inside us, we can respond to the inner and outer world with agility and grace. We can use our eagle natures to help us do a flyover of troubling situations, and listen respectfully to the voice of fire.

If we use addictions and distractions to relieve our emotional suffering, we’ll actually cement it. If we don’t understand Spinoza’s premise that suffering will cease when understanding has been reached, we’ll see suffering as an immovable, intractable thing, and we’ll require dissociative substances and practices just to stay alive.

If you use any addictive, distracting, or dissociative practices, you don’t need to feel ashamed of yourself or quit cold turkey, but you should know what you’re doing with your distraction of choice and why you’re doing it.

The Buddhist saying Suffering is discomfort multiplied by resistance applies to our encounters with distractions. If we can just sit with an uncomfortable emotion, we can understand ourselves more deeply. But if we resist the emotion and turn toward avoidance and distraction, we begin to suffer.

We’ve created a culture that relies on distraction and avoidance as a way of life. We don’t allow our discomfort to inform us, and we always seek distraction or avoidance instead. This is the defining movement in our training and in our culture.

The most broken people in a society tell us where our society is most broken. When we’re distracted, we can’t remember that. We can’t see the part we all play in the creation and nurturance of poverty, because we’re distracted by money.

We must address the underlying motivation for distractions and addictions, which is the need for relief from the discomfort of unhealed trauma. We cannot move forward into the world of emotions until we address trauma seriously, because it severely impacts our lives, families, and culture.

If more than half of us were deaf, we would expect to see a vastly different society than one where deafness is not so prevalent. If more than half of us could only speak Spanish, we would expect to see a different culture than one where German or English predominates.

The definition of trauma is individual. You know it when you see it or experience it. Trauma can occur when you’ve been assaulted or attacked, but it can also occur during surgery or dental procedures, in response to the death of a loved one, or even from witnessing someone else’s trauma.

I began to see dissociation as a widespread survival skill, not just for the situations we all agree upon as traumatic, but for a vast number of agitating or overwhelming everyday situations. I saw that trauma survivors tended to affect the people around them; they created an atmosphere that provoked dissociation and avoidance behaviors in their circle of friends and family.

The movement of culture has been to separate spirit from body, and mind from emotion. As a result, many of us have poorly moderated quaternities or dissociated personalities. We cannot focus ourselves properly, and our hygiene is bad.

Our society is rife with unhealed trauma and unrelieved dissociation. As a result, most of us are not fully aware of how or why we dissociate. We are drawn to the distracted and dissociated behaviors that infect our culture.

When survivors respond to their trauma by traumatizing themselves, they usually repress it and re-create its atmosphere in their inner lives. When they respond to it by traumatizing others, they are simply expressing their trauma onto others.

When we choose to repress our traumatic material, we repress our emotions as well. When we choose to express our traumatic material and visit it upon others, we are emotional exploders. Neither choice allows us to live full and conscious lives.

We don’t consider the third response to trauma, which is to channel it from within an awakened psyche and to turn the trauma on its ear.

I realized that traumatic and dissociative behaviors are universal, and that expression and repression are at the center of the trouble. I brought more vision and emotion into my thought process. I realized that trauma is not the real problem, because it is a fact of life. The issue is not in the danger or in the dissociation, but in the fact that we don’t have the resilience to bring ourselves back to center after a danger has passed.

There is a chicken-and-egg situation when it comes to how we became unable to resolve trauma. Did we become unable to resolve trauma because we don’t have a fully resourced village inside us, or did we lose access to the village inside us because we don’t understand how to reintegrate ourselves after trauma.

The three stages of tribal initiation are being isolated from the known world, having an ordeal or brush with death, and being recognized and welcomed back as an initiated person. Nonindigenous cultures have lost the wholeness of their tribes, while still enjoying the freedom and individuality that comes with it.

In tribal initiation, stage one is an organized, expected removal from the parents and the everyday patterns of the tribe. In trauma, however, there is no preparation.

Traumatic stage two is the out-of-control moment of the assault, when the initiate is separated from their spirit and body. There is no organization to the ordeal, and no promise of an end.

The third stage of an initiatory process is when the entire tribe recognizes the new person and welcomes him or her as an initiated and valued member of the tribe. This is why the third stage is so important. Without it, the initiation and the initiate are unfinished, and the tribe is incomplete.

When we can understand the essence of initiation, we can see that both responses to traumatic initiations, the repressive self-abuse and the expressive abuse of others, are unconscious repetitions of stages one and two. When we cycle unrelieved trauma through our inner or outer world, we’re still in the process of initiation.

In therapy groups and in prison tribes, trauma survivors are moved to a sort of stage three. However, neither welcoming process allows trauma survivors to take their place as respected elders in our culture.

When the welcoming tribe is made up of people who have experienced similar trauma, initiates often receive the wrong message about belonging and identity. They become survivors of a specific set of circumstances instead of becoming fully initiated adults.

When your fully resourced psyche can be brought to bear on your trauma, the sacred wound at the center of your trauma can be revealed. When your vision and your multiple intelligences can track the trauma’s origins, you can take your honorable place in the currents of time and culture.

When we can heal trauma from a fully resourced perspective, we become deeply connected to the center of our selves and to the center of our troubled society. When we are whole, we can see that traumatic avoidance, distraction, and dissociation form the basis for most people’s lives.

When we move from stage two to stage three, we realize that we’re not broken apart by our wounds, but rather, we’re broken open by them. We become more energy, more information, and more love. We become not half-alive survivors of trauma, but beautifully scarred elders, visionaries, and healers of our tribes.

The French author and trauma survivor Jean Genet spoke to the heart of this three-stage healing process in his harrowing written account of his own post-traumatic journey, The Thief’s Journal. He said that acts must be carried through to their completion. Whatever their point of departure, the end will be beautiful.

The erasure techniques have some value in extreme post-traumatic responses, but most of us don’t fall into that category. We are taught to function fairly well around our traumas through ingenious avoidance or addictive behaviors.

When we view trauma from a fully resourced perspective, we can understand balance and equilibrium as flowing and malleable things that respond to their environment. We can understand that healing cannot occur until the original wound has been addressed to the satisfaction of the soul.

The third stage of healing is not a peaceful, anesthetized, or predictable process. It is a vibrant and utterly singular process that creates not mere survivors, but fully initiated soul warriors.

The first emotions that arise when people begin healing from distractions, avoidance behaviors, addictions, or traumatic dissociations are anger and fear. Anger and fear are intrinsic to the process of coming back to wholeness. They signal that real healing is underway.

When we tell angry people to drop their real emotions and behave in more manageable ways, we are essentially asking them not to restore their boundaries. In so doing, we make the work of legitimately angry people nearly impossible.

Forgiveness is a beautiful and necessary movement, but it has to be honest and emotional. It can’t be thrown out the window in the guise of forgiveness, because then it becomes incomplete. It must be done honestly and with emotion.

Forgiveness is a decision made by your whole self after your emotional work has been done. It is not an emotion, and it cannot take the place of one. It is a process that creates true separations from torment and tormentors, and true separations require the proper application of boundary-restoring anger.

Forgiveness is good, but it must be done correctly. It must be performed from the unconscious position of stages one and two, and it must reduce our ability to be present with the pain we feel. When we rush to forgiveness, we lose our connection to our original wounds.

Forgiveness is a practice in itself. It is a gradual process of strengthening and unwinding that helps trauma survivors separate their innate selves from their traumatic behaviors. Real forgiveness frees people and shoots them forward in consciousness, and that kind of movement only occurs in a resourced psyche where the body, the multiple intelligences, and all of the emotions are allowed to move freely.

Love is a constant, and it is not an emotion. It is everywhere, and it cannot be found by listening to the language of emotions. Love is constant, and it endures all emotions, trauma, betrayal, divorce, and even death.

Emotion is something different from love. You can be furious with someone you love, frightened of them, and utterly disappointed in them, but the love never wavers. Love lives in a realm far deeper than the emotions, and in that deep and rich place, words don’t carry much meaning.

The five empathic skills are body-based, and they help you navigate competently through your emotions, thoughts, sensations, and visions. They rely on the power of imagery, and they help you immediately become more able to access your emotional realm.

When your emotions are in their free-flowing states, it’s a simple thing to work with them. However, when they move to mood states or raging rapids, you can become overwhelmed. These empathic skills will help you maintain your equilibrium.

When you can focus your attention on your body in the present moment, you’ll be able to navigate and deal with the flows in each of your elements. When you can ground yourself, you’ll be more capable and confident in the inner and outer worlds.

The key to maintaining your focus is to accept distractions and avoidance behaviors as normal and necessary. When you can move between clear focus and diffused consciousness, you’ll have equal access to the center of your defined and grounded awareness and to the dreamy and ephemeral parts of your psyche.

Your personal space, or your aura, is your personal boundary. It is the space around you that you can feel when people stare at you or when you’re in a crowded elevator. It is the neural and visceral manifestation of your personal space.

Your personal boundary is the area around your body that is your responsibility. It is your skin, but it is also your imagination, your emotions, and your focus. It is your space in the world.

Boundaries are difficult to define and maintain, and that’s normal. But when you do, you’ll be able to avoid enmeshing with people and breaking their boundaries. When you’re properly defined, it becomes easier to be empathic in a non-empathic world.

You can create an emergency boundary by becoming angry or anxious when you’re tired and vulnerable. You can also create a false boundary by using a cloud of cigarette smoke to keep people out.

Your personal space is a sanctuary of solitude that no other people can enter. It should be filled with images that make you feel whole. It should be clear that no living people or expectations from the outside world are allowed in this sacred place.

Your brightly defined boundary should be in place at all times, because it can be likened to the skin of your proprioceptive body. You wouldn’t allow the skin on your physical body to wither or degrade, so you should keep your boundary healthy.

The third skill in this process is burning contracts, which helps you separate yourself from behaviors and attitudes that destabilize you. When you’re grounded, focused, and well-defined, you can view your behaviors not as life sentences, but as inclinations you can choose to support or release.

To burn a contract with an idea, behavior, stance, or relationship, begin by focusing and grounding yourself. Illuminate your boundary with a very bright color, and breathe normally. Imagine unrolling a large piece of blank parchment paper right in front of you.

The burning of contracts is the central skill of the emotional channeling process. It allows you to move energy and information from one place to another while you bring your behaviors, attitudes, and stances into your conscious awareness.

When you can free yourself from old behaviors, stagnant attitudes, or unworkable relationships, you will no longer require constant distractions, addictions, or avoidance behaviors. When you can bring your entire village to bear on your issues, you’ll regain your resilience and your equilibrium.

It is easy to get into a bad mood or a stagnant place and forget all your skills and emotional wisdom. It is easy to fall into emotional repression and incompetent expression. When this happens, your ignored and mismanaged emotions will intensify and repeat themselves.

The importance of complaining is that it helps you identify your most important work. If you dream constantly of writing, training horses, traveling, going back to school, or becoming a clown, that dream is a clear treasure map that will lead you to your central vocation.

Complaining is a skill that allows you to express your frustrations with the world. It is a way to release pent-up emotions, and it can be done alone or with someone else. It is especially helpful in a life of striving, good works, and personal growth, where complaining is often considered less than saintly.

Positive thinking is the opposite of conscious complaining. It attempts to replace negative thoughts with more positive ones, but this doesn’t address the issues behind the problem. Instead, it simply tells you how to feel.

Positive thinking is helpful when it’s true, just as negative thinking is helpful when it’s true. If the phrase I’m wonderful and marvelous! comes barreling out of your psyche, it’s a sign of happiness moving through you in its own way and its own time.

After burning a contract, it’s important to rejuvenate yourself so that old behaviors don’t re-animate themselves. To do this, you must refill your empty space consciously. If you don’t, it will be filled unconsciously, and you don’t want that.

If you’ve found a way to rejuvenate and self-soothe, congratulations! This is a wonderful way to call your attention and vitality back from all the places it rushes to. It’s important to maintain a balance between the work you do when you ground and define yourself and channel your emotions, and the work you do when you just let go and enjoy yourself.

When you bring your awareness to the activities that loom over you or if your life is imbalanced by them, skip back to the chapter on addictions and see what you might be seeking in these entertainments.

Change is a skill in and of itself. These empathic skills will awaken many sleeping parts of you and allow your emotions to come forward, which will constitute a large change in your inner landscape. If certain skills feel utterly strange or even impossible, pay attention and support those reactions.

When you have access to one or more of these skills, you can use them in whatever way you see fit. Your rejuvenation practice should be used regularly because we tend to be so forgetful about taking care of ourselves.

When you re-integrate the village inside you, ask your mind to support your emotions with its excellent ability to name and translate things. Ask your body to keep you in touch with your emotions as they move through you. And remember that your goal is wholeness, not perfection.

The second half of the book is dedicated to the emotions. As your awareness deepens, you’ll find that you can’t truly separate your emotions from one another. Your job is not to organize them into neat little compartments, but to welcome their lively energies into your life.

The primary rule of emotional flow is that all emotions are true. They tell the absolute truth about either the specific situation that brought the emotion into play or some area of the psyche. When you understand emotions empathically, your emotions won’t threaten or destabilize you.

Emotions don’t cause trouble on their own. They simply bring energy and information forward. If you don’t honor them, you’ll not only stop your growth and evolution, but you’ll also cause your emotions to fester and stagnate.

Maintaining flow in each of your elements isn’t a difficult or time-consuming process. You can maintain your bodily flow throughout your day by simply making circular movements with your wrists or ankles when you’re at your desk, or by yawning, stretching, and vocalizing quietly. You can maintain your intellectual flow by allowing your mind to plan, organize, and scheme freely.

The emotions are a wonderful place to practice your empath skills. They are the source of our most powerful experiences, and they are also the source of our most repetitive behaviors. If an emotion just won’t respond to you, or if certain emotional states are repetitive and troubling, reach out for help.

It is not healthy to be utterly empathic with everyone you meet. Your emotions should flow in your own life, not in others’. If you maintain a constant, unwavering level of empathic receptivity without any balancing or cleansing practices, your life will become completely disordered.

When dealing with angry people, it’s important to remember that they need protection and not restoration. You should set your own boundary strongly before attempting to intervene. Don’t try to create boundaries for angry people or teach them in any way; interference will only degrade their boundaries further.

Emotions are like the weather, they come and go. If you’re not able to deal with them, they will repeat themselves. If you’ve got unhealthy beliefs about your emotions, you know what to do: burn your contracts and move on.

When you are enraged, you are in a state of extreme distress, and your physical and emotional environments must be examined carefully. Your angers may have been building for years, and your jobs or home lives may be unbearable.

It is important to pour your rage and fury into your boundary immediately. Their intensity can disrupt your body if you try to repress them. When you’re inside a fierce boundary, you’ll feel all the strength and intensity of your rage and fury without needing to take yourself or others out of commission.

When you’ve channeled your rage and fury, you can return to the original conflict because your boundary and self-awareness will be restored, your body and psyche will be cleared out, and you’ll be revitalized.

Rage and fury are important emotions for unhealed trauma survivors, as they help them replace what was lost in the trauma. They are fiercely protective emotions that only arise in times of extreme need, and they are necessary for rebuilding devastated boundaries and establishing sacred space for the journey through the three-stage healing process.

The empathic process of trauma healing does not come with maps or guidebooks. It is an intense and unique journey that takes place in the soul’s own time and in the soul’s own way. It is most common for rages and furies to come forward first, but this does not always occur.

When you’re ready, you’ll be able to perform this full-body movement to the third stage of initiation. Your first task is to create the sacred space in which that work can occur: channel your angers, rages, and furies into your boundary and into intensified grounding.

It is very easy to crumble in the face of this sort of turmoil, which is why skills, support, and sacred space are necessary. Your ability to ground and focus yourself will allow you to halt any distraction or dissociation you experience.

If you can welcome your shame, you can begin to identify the different forms it takes. Welcome your free-flowing ability to effortlessly support ethical behaviors in yourself and others.

If you’re still angry after you’ve performed your favorite rejuvenation practice, flip back to the practice for rage and fury in section entitled The Practice for Rage and Fury: The Only Way Out Is Through.

It is very difficult to create sacred space for hatred in other people if they have no skills or awareness. If you can allow people to complain to you, you will provide them with the opportunity to bring all their material forward. This talking is a healing in and of itself.

You can do some pre-emptive shadow-retrieval work by writing down all of the qualities you see in someone you adore and in another person you gossip about. Your gossip target will hold shadow for you, just as your adoration target will.

Forgiveness is a crucial part of the healing process, but it is often misguidedly connected to hatred. Real forgiveness isn’t about making excuses for people’s horrific behavior, but rather about recognizing that real damage has occurred.

The essence of a person can never be stolen, erased, desecrated, or destroyed. It seems to return on the wave of powerful, rapids-level emotions, as if the submerged, shadowy essence of the survivor is sending assistance into the heart of the trouble.

When you understand the healing and restorative powers of the emotions, you’ll welcome them in whatever form they choose. You won’t demonize any one emotion, and you won’t allow forgiveness to loom above any of them.

If you can channel your own hatred and retrieve your shadow, you’ll become your whole self again. You’ll become a shadow-fortified (instead of shadow-persecuted) soul warrior who creates peace, true mercy, and honest forgiveness from authentic strength.

When you’re driving and checking both rearview mirrors, easing out of the way of slowed or speeding cars, signaling your intentions, and making eye contact with other drivers, your flowing fear is at work. Your instincts are fully engaged, and you’re constantly scanning your changing environment for novelties and dangers.

When you’re working at your office, answering phones, juggling schedules, and tracking down supplies or contractors, your entire being is engaged and focused. You’re scanning through significant amounts of information, altering your behavior in response to changing demands, and ensuring that your business will continue to thrive.

If you can’t or won’t integrate your frightening experiences, you’ll remain in a constant state of alarm and readiness: your adrenals will pump full-time, and you’ll find yourself jumping, starting, and striking out at everything. Your body won’t be able to relax, your sleep may become disturbed, and your eating habits may fall into disorder.

When you’re reintegrated, you’ll be able to move, think, dream, sleep, feel, laugh, and love again not because you’ve eradicated all traces of trauma from your soul, but because you’re fully resourced and whole again.

You can help yourself heal and reintegrate by participating in yoga, qigong, and tai chi, as well as dancing, swimming, and sports. Martial arts and self-defense classes teach you the rules of engagement for physical conflicts, which can help you defend yourself in the future.

I learned that physical movement can help heal trauma, as it allows the body to release tension and the mind to process memories. I began moving more like Jax, who was always curious and excited to explore his surroundings, than Rufus, who was always suspicious and afraid.

If you’ve survived a trauma, be aware of your movement patterns and frozen or numbed areas in your body. Do not pathologize them or blame yourself for holding on to them. Sealing off painful or damaged areas is a very good coping mechanism because until you have skills, the pains you carry can seem overwhelming.

When you channel despair, you’ll release a massive clog in your psyche. If you’re not grounded and centered, you may be knocked down by the sudden restoration of your flow, so make sure you ground and focus yourself before you begin.

It can be extremely difficult to help people who are trapped in a cycle of despair. They have no investment in working through their problems, and they’re not resourced or living in the present.

Depression is a cyclical movement through any number of repetitive states, and it often incorporates despair, but it isn’t made of despair alone. Depression is a rich topic that will be explored in detail in chapter 22.

I was always fascinated by death and horror, and I used them to further hone my dissociative skills. I didn’t grieve or mourn when my grandparents died because I was unable to get close to my body or my emotions to feel any loss. I never wailed or cried.

If you’re a primarily intellectual person, and this talk of spirits and the other world sounds like gibberish to you, think of it this way: if you don’t grieve your losses, the people who have died either get erased from your consciousness or they hang around in your psyche as if you’re being haunted.

When we don’t allow ourselves to grieve, we’re repeatedly traumatized by death. When we refuse to feel the pain of loss, we refuse to honor our connections. We trick ourselves into thinking that we can guard ourselves against all pain if we just refuse to grieve.

In indigenous wisdom traditions, it is known that if a culture doesn’t properly grieve their loved ones into their death journeys, they cannot properly welcome their children into their life journeys.

Ritual exists to help us navigate and survive the necessary (and often wrenching) passages of our lives. Without ritual, we lose community and the sacred, as well as our ability to live, love, feel, and grieve.

Your first task is to stay integrated by grounding and centering yourself instead of rushing off into distractions or dissociating completely. Your second task is to create a shrine for the dead or the loss so that you can create a container for your mourning and some delineation between this world and the next.

When the grieving is finished, move yourself and the mourner away from the shrine, and have something to eat or drink as a way to ground yourselves.

To stop distracted and addictive eating, you must first recognize your emotions. When your emotions are trapped and troubled, they need to be honored and channeled, not fed.

You came into this world trailing, as Robert Bly wrote in A Little Book on the Human Shadow, spontaneousities wonderfully preserved from our 150,000 years of tree life, angers well preserved from our 5,000 years of tribal life. You can save the world by allowing yourself to be happy, even slaphappy, while allowing equal time for the adult view, the depression, and the truth of the degradation all around you.

Exhilaration, the fourth healthy form of happiness, is when you become not happy and silly, but skittish, delirious, and ungrounded. It is a clear sign of a rupture between your spirit and your body and a conflict between your emotions and your logical intellect.

Exhilaration is an addictive and dissociative state, and it can’t be honored or supported in safe ways until the exhilarated person is ready to come back to earth. If you’re involved with people who adhere to exhilarated fire-only practices, you may have to protect yourself from them for your own health and well-being.

The word stress is not an acceptable answer to any of these questions. It is a term from the world of physics and engineering, where it is defined as a pressure, pull, or force exerted on one thing by another.

When your flow and agility are gone, the actual stressor becomes unimportant. You can be just as stressed-out by falling in love as you can by losing your job. If you can ground and focus yourself, you’ll be able to meet these challenges in agile and resourceful ways.

When you’re stressed-out, remember that you’re disconnected from your ground-ing, your flow, your agility, your sense of humor, your instincts, and your ability to set boundaries. You can connect with your emotions and ask yourself what they mean for you.

You can’t control the flows of the world, but you can prepare yourself for any eventuality by nurturing flow and balance within your own psyche and by becoming a conduit through which the currents of honesty, ingenuity, vision, and emotions can flow.

If you’re physically grounded and supple, your flexibility will help you meet your changing environment in resourceful ways. If you’re mentally alert and adaptable, your intelligences and focus will help you think, plan, and plot your way through any obstacle.

Resistance is the ability to oppose, withstand, or strive against an action or a thing. In emotional resistance, you’re able to oppose, withstand, or strive against an emotion, and this can lead to change or protection against change.

If you can embrace your resistance and turn toward your suffering, you’ll become incredibly resourceful and useful. You don’t have to erase your resistance to become enlightened, but you do have to embrace it and use it to gain awareness.

You are an empath, and as an empath, you are able to engage with emotions because you have the capacity to identify and welcome them as distinct and specific entities. You have endless amounts of information at your disposal, and you can use this to your advantage.

When you work as an empath, you won’t become superior or invincible. You’ll simply become more able to work with your emotions, your body, your multiple intelligences, and your eagle nature than the average person.

As you continue your empathic work, you may become more aware of the suffering around you and more involved in the journeys of the people in your life. This means that you are making the world around you safer for emotions and emotional awareness.

References

• https://karlamclaren.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Language-of-Emotions-Reading-Guide.pdf
• http://curioushealing.com/2014/07/the-language-of-emotions-by-karla-mclaren/
• https://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/books/reviews/view/20020
• https://www.scribd.com/book/571062577/Summary-of-Karla-McLaren-s-The-Language-of-Emotions
• https://karlamclaren.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Emotional-Vocabulary-List.pdf