?? Sense - Story - Charge ??

Hello, my friends!

Today I share a bit of a doozy with you. This is the full lecture from Week 5 of the Pathways in Consciousness course.

In this week, we explore emotions and healthy processing. And we do a deep dive into the power of feelings in crafting an intentional life.

I hope you enjoy!

"Sense-Story-Charge

Hello, my friends!

Welcome to Week 5 of the Only Human: Foundations Intensive!

Over the last month, we’ve been exploring breath and rhythm.

You’ve learned how to slow your rhythm with breath, attention, and relaxation, how to enter a light meditative state.

You’ve practiced bringing the natural benefits of the meditative state into your life when it matters, noticing your rhythm even in the press of life.

You’ve learned how to deepen the meditative state to enter the prayer and journey states, and you’ve begun to explore the different ways in which you can make use of this natural human ability to improve your quality of life.

And all this is amazing.

But it’s just the beginning.

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Think about it. You might be going along in your day, relatively present, aware of your breath… and then wham!

We get triggered!

Emotions come up and blindside us, and the next thing we know, we launch into unconscious reaction.

We might say things we later regret, or take actions that don’t serve us or the others in the situation.

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Emotions can be so overwhelming that they bowl us right over.

So, many people learn early in life that they cannot trust their emotions.

They try to push back the uncomfortable feelings, the pain and fear and doubt and sadness and anger, all the bits we’d rather not see.

But that doesn’t really work.

We can push our emotions back time and again, and they’ll just come up the next time, often with greater force than before.

What’s more, the longer we suppress our emotions, the harder we have to work later to become conscious of them again.

In other words, if we’ve suppressed our emotions deeply, we can be moved by them without even being aware of it.

They operate from the unconscious, unintegrated with our conscious awareness, and they often wreak havoc in our lives.

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But our emotions are not something to be afraid of.

They are wise teachers and friends, guides and allies.

The challenge is not our emotions, but that we’ve never been taught how to work with them.

So, over this week and the next, we’ll unpack the emotions and learn how to work with them.

We’ll explore how to understand the wisdom they offer, and how to hold space and process the things that arise from within.

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So, let’s start with a little emotional 101.

First and foremost, every single emotion that we experience is speaking to us.

The emotions have their own language.

In really oversimplified terms, sadness alerts us to unmet needs, fear signals us to take action, and anger tells us when our boundaries have been crossed.

Joy lets us know that what we are doing is working for us.

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The challenge is that our emotions don’t go away until we make space to process them.

So, let’s say that you got upset yesterday. And you distracted yourself, moved on, dealt with the situation at hand, and consciously forgot about the feeling.

That feeling didn’t go away.

When we ignore, distract, bypass, or otherwise don’t process our emotions, they sink down into our bodies and our fields, below the threshold of conscious awareness.

We carry unconscious emotions in our muscle tension and just beneath the surface, where it comes out in our attitude, tone, muscle tension, body language, unconscious selection, and myriad other ways.

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So let’s play it out.

Most of us have been taught to suck it up. Get over it and be strong. In other words, push the emotions down and suppress them so that we can get on.

If we grow up learning nothing more about our emotions than how to suppress them, then we start collecting old, unintegrated emotional charge in our bodies and our fields.

Eventually, we come to a point and things start boiling over. We might crash, or snap, or self-sabotage, or lash out.

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Regardless of how we behave at these times, it is a result of our unprocessed emotions that have collected to a point where they act without conscious intention.

The reason we learn not to trust our emotions is first, they take us over, and second, they sometimes move us to act irrationally, in ways that do not serve us.

Emotions take over when we get triggered. And, if we don’t notice it, then we launch into unconscious reaction, often without even knowing why.

So the first step in learning healthy emotional regulation is to learn to notice when we’re triggered.

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The last four weeks, you have been practicing awareness.

You have been cultivating awareness around your breath, and learning to use triggers as a cue to tune in to your breath.

Especially when you get hurt, or afraid, or flustered, or overwhelmed.

So, without even realizing it, you have been learning to notice when you’re triggered, and you’ve learned how to respond to this trigger with breath, rather than simply taking action.

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This week, you’re going to learn some solid techniques to deal with triggers when they happen, but before we go there, let’s take a closer look at emotional processing.

So, as I said a moment ago, emotions come up when we are triggered.

The challenge is that we don’t at first know whether we’re getting an old, suppressed emotion, or valid emotional feedback about a present situation.

We suppress emotions when we push them down, when we don’t have time or space or understanding enough to sit with them and process them when they occur.

But our emotions don’t go away until we process them.

Until we allow ourselves to sit and feel them in the body, until we lean in, relax, and breathe through them, they will keep coming back again and again.

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And it doesn’t stop with the feelings. Suppressed emotions blossom into physical situations, chronic life patterns that repeat until we process the emotional core that holds them in place.

So, most of us are carrying a weight of unprocessed emotion around, unintegrated charge that operates from our subconscious, without conscious intention.

And, since these emotions seem to come up all the time, it’s hard to tell if we’re triggered by something that’s happening right now, or something from the past that we have not yet dealt with.

With suppressed emotions, we get triggered by something that is similar enough to a past experience to remind us of it, of a situation and emotional reaction that we were unable to process when it first occurred.

So it’s hard to tell at first whether this anger, for instance, is alerting us to the fact that our boundary is crossed now, or if it is an old feeling of anger triggered by an otherwise harmless situation.

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So here are a few cliches for you about emotions processing:

What you resist, persists.

If you try to push an emotion away, it will come back. If you try to avoid or escape an emotion (or a life situation linked with that emotion) it will find you.

In order to get true relief, in order to allow ourselves to process old charge, we have to surrender and let it in. We have to stop running and allow ourselves to feel it.

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If you can feel it, you can heal it.

Our suppressed emotions will wreak havoc in our lives until we can lift them up into conscious awareness and truly allow ourselves to feel them.

So, when it comes up, the best thing we can do is take a moment and make some space to really feel it.

Once we breathe through it in the body, we create space around the feeling, and we have the opportunity to respond rather than react.

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We are healed from our pain only by experiencing it to the fullest.

We can’t escape things inside of us, but we can exhaust ourselves and tear up our lives trying. The only approach that has any traction in the long run is to really let ourselves feel it.

Here’s a tip: Emotions are processed in the body, not the mind.

When you get triggered, if you are able to keep aware of the feeling of the emotion in your body,...

…if you breathe and allow it to move through you,...

…the intensity will pass within 15 minutes, and you’ll notice a bit more space around the sensation.

With that space comes choice. Freedom. Reclaimed from old charge, and evidenced by the ability to respond differently to the things that you experience in your life.

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So, not to put too fine a point on it, the head just gets in the way when it comes to emotional processing.

We don’t process emotions by understanding them or by learning where they came from or what life experiences they’re linked to.

All of these things can get us to the gate.

Which means they can bring us to the point where the emotion comes up into our conscious awareness so we can process it in the body and allow it to shift from our field.

The main goal for the head with emotional processing is to get out of the way so that we can feel this shift in the body.

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Now, this goes much deeper than what I’ve thus far described.

Our emotions are our own, for example.

They may be triggered by the outer world, but all the outer world is doing is helping us to come in contact with charge that we already hold in our field.

No one else is responsible for your emotions.

No one can process them for you, and you don’t need to address an outer situation (like a conflict with a loved one) before processing the emotions that this brings up for you.

Quite the contrary. If you attend to the emotional processing first, everything will work more smoothly when you come to this individual for resolution.

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Another: our emotional reaction to a situation is dependent upon how we interpret that situation, upon what the situation means to us. And we have some say in that.

Healthy interpretation and conscious meaning can completely shift the emotional content of our lives, which then, in turn, shifts everything else.

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Finally, I’d like to leave you with a perspective that can help to bring clarity to the emotions, which can be a pretty foggy and mystifying space to work with.

In this moment, and in every moment of your life, your perception consists of three active elements: sense, story, and charge.

We have the bubble of the senses, what we can see, hear, feel, smell, and taste.

This is a stream of raw sense data. It is neutral, which means it doesn’t have any emotional charge or conceptual meaning until we add it.

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Next, some things we perceive will trigger emotional charge.

We may not be able to tell what we’re feeling in a given moment, but if we’re paying attention, we can easily notice when we have charge around something we observe or experience.

Once we have discovered a bit of charge, the goal is to sit with it and process it, so that we can reclaim our freedom and our ability to respond consciously and intentionally to our life.

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In addition to sense and charge, we also have story.

To break this down a bit, look at the room or the space around you.

You might see trees, and along with the green and brown, the color and form and solidity, you have the word “tree” and whatever ideas you have around these trees.

I use the term story to mean all conceptual knowledge. So, any words or concrete ideas we have about things are stories.

Stories are ways of understanding an object or situation, and they all have an embedded vantage point.

So, for example, when I see a cup, I think of the word cup, the function of the cup. Perhaps I’ll consider how I’ve used this cup in the past or how I might employ it in the future.

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All stories are relative to our vantage point.

A cup, for example, means something different to me than it does to an ant.

If an ant were to interpret that cup, it would bring up different feelings because it stands in relation to the cup differently than I do.

Story is conceptual knowledge, concrete interpretation, and completely relative to our participation.

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Sense-story-charge is an excellent perspective to bring clarity into our perceptions.

Watch for moments of charge, and use them as cues to sit and hold space for yourself, space to process this emotional charge naturally.

Notice the difference between what you perceive (sense), and the emotions that arise within you.

Break these two things apart by perceiving them as independent aspects of your experience.

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No one and nothing can make you feel anything or any particular way.

We can, however, have emotions arise within in response to things we perceive.

When you can clearly distinguish between what you perceive and the emotions that arise within you, you gain a new level of freedom, unimagined in our emotionally conditioned state.

That’s what all this is about, really. In being willing to process our emotions whenever they come up, we are on the path to overcome emotional conditioning and reclaim our free will.

We are on the path to Inner Freedom and the ability to serve something we truly value.

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Story is a huge topic, and one that we’ll explore in greater detail in the weeks ahead.

For now, simply remember that stories are not Truths.

They are ways of explaining the world to ourselves so that we can most effectively navigate it. As soon as we learn to shift our perspective, our entire experience of the world shifts.

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When you have a trigger come up, practice noticing what your senses receive.

Observe how this sensory information is interpreted (modified by story), and what emotions arise within you as a product of this interpretation.

And, when you have emotions come up, practice holding space for yourself to allow these emotions to be processed in a healthy way, rather than suppressed.

And that’s our introduction to the emotional realm.

Next class, we’ll be discussing tools to handle triggers and to come to understand the language of the emotions more clearly."

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I hope you have enjoyed this Intro to Healthy Navigation in the Emotional Realm.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

From these beginnings, I share deep dives into the human condition, exploring the nuances of experience and mapping out our full potential.

If you'd like to learn more, drop a line in the comments and I'll reach out.

Thanks and blessings!