Humanity did not create humanity – we just like to think we did.
Thinking we did and then trying to operate ourselves and our emotional responses along the ‘logical’ patterns established in our left, logical thinking neo-cortex causes us to create complex arguments for resisting the emotional release process nature has provided us with.
‘I should not be having this emotional response’ is our ego’s way of trying to establish control, using nothing more than it’s ability to resist the release of emotional energy, over what millions of years of life has put in place for us to access.
Here is an ego-busting fact: the organic connections linking our emotional lower brain to our upper thinking brain are separate from the connections linking our upper thinking brain to our lower emotional brain – and they are much, much stronger.
It is biologically impossible for your thinking to eliminate the need to acknowledge the influence your emotions have over you. You can work with your emotions and you can reduce their negative affects by learning to release them so quickly and to such an extent you hardly ever have to struggle with them - but you cannot permanently resist and ignore them.
As a defence mechanism for protecting our hard-won thinking structures the ego is neither good nor bad – but it needs to surrender its hold when dealing with emotional release or it causes us to live a life based on lies and denial and this leads to emotional blocking and overcharging – what we refer to as emotional illness or disorders.
You are organic.
You did not create your emotional system nor any other part of your organic being; natural life did that for you. Your body obeys the same principles every other mammalian body on the planet has to – what you or any other person you interact with thinks about this fact makes no difference.
As a baby you knew exactly how your emotional system worked and you worked with it – as an adult, especially if you have an emotional disorder of any kind, you have most likely been socially programmed to resist it.
Sometimes resistance is a social necessity, but this resistance can go too far, to the point it makes you organically sick as you become emotionally overcharged due to habitual extreme emotional blocking.
Let me repeat - you are organic. You are only able to think because nature made you so you could think; you see imagery in your brain because nature designed you to see things that way; you feel because nature said you needed to feel in order to stay alive and it wants you stay alive long enough to create new life and any new life you create will also have to obey the same principles of organic living you have to.
You can train your emotional system; you can learn from it; you can see it as your greatest resource or your greatest enemy - but you cannot remove it without removing yourself from life.
When you open up to organic truth you actually open up to your true natural self – and it can hurt like hell at first – particularly if you have an emotional disorder of any kind.
The greatest blow to our egos comes when we start to accept we are powerless to change our biology – we may feel helpless and depressed about it. If we do the ‘feeling work’ required, however, the time comes when this apparently helpless state transforms into knowledge, understanding and then successful, if very slow, emotional progress with eventual unconditional happiness being achieved more often and then almost permanently as a result.
From Complex Resistance to Simple Release
When we suffer with an emotional disorder it is because a collection of socially programmed ‘memes’ (thought patterns adopted from those around us) have combined with our own self-criticisms, alongside our unmet wishes and wants, to form a complex ‘mental resistance stew’.
You may be or have been in a situation that created an intense emotional response or a number of emotional responses running closely together and you began arguing with the responses themselves – that they should not be happening.
They were making a bad situation worse. You were not reacting to the situation in the way you would wish and your emotions were driving you against your conscious will. You hated yourself. More truthfully, you hated your organic self. Why could you just not react perfectly – like Ghandi or Mother Teresa or some other saintly figure might in the same situation? Your emotions made you feel stupid.
You saw your emotional system as working against you. Resistance Stew emerged in your body and mind. This kind of stew contains complex arguments against feeling your feelings.
Your logical mind continually builds resistant layers, one over the other, supporting the unconscious resistant beliefs already in place – while wondering at the same time when help is coming from some external source to stop it all.
Unfortunately the only way to get rid of this Complex Resistance Stew is to eat it. Taste it. Challenge it by going through it. At first when you start to do this the whole thing looks even worse because you bring together all the feelings, all the images, all the thoughts. Your logical mind is swamped by intense hormonally driven stimulation and it resents having to go through this because it knows these things only exist within the confines of your own mind and body and not in the real world.
What a mess. But if you eat the mess, if you enter it and digest it for long enough, simplicity starts to emerge.
There are only three main elements to the development and removal of an emotional disorder; but first let us look at the normal emotional process:
The three main elements of your normal emotional system
(please note this model ignores what goes on in terms of external behaviours and feedback from external sources)
- Words work together to interpret, describe, and produce
- representational Images which lead to the production of and attachment to
- Feelings triggered in your lower Limbic brain the chemical outputs of which are produced in your body as energetic drives and vibrations.
Together the overall result is ‘Experiential Reflection’. That’s the first half of the emotional cycle and now:
- Feeling energies come back up from the body driving the production of
- images which act as release valves through which the emotional energy attached is allowed to escape through the process of full body and mind vibration and when the emotional energy has passed through our body and mind and the
- (Limbic) emotional brain sees the full emotional cycle has been completed it stops producing new emotional responses and this then leads to the revealing of the
- image-building words that initially produced them.
Finally, because we find that thinking in certain ways or being in certain situations causes us this intense emotional pain we either decide to change the way we think in those situations or instead decide to avoid those situations as much as possible and keep the word-based thinking structure we have in place.
The important thing here is that a conscious decision has to be made and acted upon in regards to future internal thinking or external actions during the emotional release process – if it is not the release process will not be completed and the response will be triggered all over again.
Add mental resistance to the emotional process though and things start to work against us. Resistance complicates the emotional process by using the left neo-cortex to create secondary imagery that shows bad things will happen if the emotional process is allowed to run its normal path.
We refuse to make changes to our thinking or our external actions and instead go to war on our emotional system itself.
Our ego does this – it says ‘I am special, my thinking structure is more important than my biology and I should not have to listen to what my organically created emotional response system is telling me’ (our emotional system is the source of our intuition, by the way, and when we block it like this we eventually enter a state of deep self-mistrust).
A blocking emotional system works likes this:
- Words work together to interpret, describe, and produce
- representational Images which lead to the production of and attachment to
- Feelings triggered in your lower Limbic brain the chemical outputs of which are produced in your body as energetic drives and vibrations.
Again, that’s the first half of the emotional cycle but now those:
- Feeling energies come back up from the body driving the production of
- images which act as release valves through which the emotional energy attached is allowed to escape through the process of full body and mind vibration but they are met with
- argumentative conflicting images showing either that the feared things depicted in those images will actually happen if the emotional energy escapes or even worse - as yet unforeseen terrible things will happen if the energy is allowed to escape; and now, seeing that the emotional cycle has not been completed the
- (Limbic) emotional brain concludes the initial situation that led to the production of the emotional response still exists (and is even more serious a threat than it first assessed) and therefore re-produces a more intense emotional response to deal with the perceived threat which causes the thinking mind to be overwhelmed with sensory stimulation and prevents the identification of
- the words creating the secondary images now being used to fight the normal emotional process and because it cannot see that it itself is the cause of the problem the logical thinking brain fights even harder to block the even more intense responses coming through and round and round it goes.
What we effectively end up with now is a very energetic, never-ending ‘story’ working within us. A battle between an argument for emotional release versus a number of arguments against emotional release. One of the two sides has to lose the argument for the story to complete – and it is an argument our logical mind can never win because it has not yet accepted the logical structure of our organic body and how the emotional system works within it. Our relatively small, low power, low energy thinking brain wants to run the show and finds itself forced to learn a long-term lesson it hates.
If we could see the various sentences driving the argument against emotional release and put them into one sentence it would say something like this:
‘I do not like the normal emotional process’.
What it tells us is that we are organic and all we have to do in order to release an emotional problem (including getting rid of all the negative imagery and thinking that comes with it) is feel.
Detect it; feel it; watch the negative imagery and thoughts go by: acknowledge the negative elements but don’t criticise yourself or hold on to them with questions of ‘why must I suffer with these?’.
Accepting negative thoughts and imagery are occasionally a part of being human means you eventually stop complicating the emotional process by creating difficult to remove arguments against it.
If you have an intense feeling go into it – stay there long enough and the imagery will appear. Feel emotions through the imagery and then any embedded thoughts attached will appear and you then get to change them so the emotional response stops being triggered.
Feel your feelings when you produce them and everything else falls into place.
Simple.
Regards - Carl
