Around town other drivers periodically do creative things that are rude and often dangerous. Like deciding to turn left from the right-hand lane of a four lane road without bothering to use a turn signal. When this happens close to me, or I am in a reactive mood, I can skip right through fear and go straight to anger. A heartbeat after the anger my mind starts a commentary on the offending driver’s mental abilities, general character, and status as something other than fully human. In an aggravated mood all sorts of creative stories, mostly unflattering, will roll through my awareness.
These stories trigger corresponding emotions, calling up all resonant old stories, justifying exactly how angry I am. This creates an ongoing feedback loop, where my mind remembers, or creates, stories to explain (justify) what I am feeling, to which my emotional body responds with the matching emotional content, calling up more stories….
I’m sure you can come up with other examples that involve any of the emotions, including the “positive” ones.
David Bohm once pointed out that the biochemistry of thoughts and emotions is essentially the same. The same neurotransmitters seem to be involved in both levels of our being, even though we experience them differently. Each thought has at least a muted associated emotional component. Our physical brain uses these to determine how important each thought is. Emotions and thoughts can arise independently, although they usually couple up in short order, as above. The ones that are heavily weighted become habits and the habitual ones are in time heavily weighted. Karma and limitation.
A key to releasing old patterns of thought or belief is to decouple them from their associated emotions. This is something like bleaching the color from a photograph, only in this case it is the emotional/energetic life force that needs to be released and reclaimed. This decoupling and neutralizing of memories and experiences, leads to freedom of choice and action, when the past no longer has the power to constrain how we respond to the present.
The mind, however, has habits and expectations. Even when the emotion charge has been cleared, current events can trigger old pictures, which may, if we aren’t paying attention, cause the emotional body will fill them back in again, with the expected emotional coloring. When you do pay attention, pause the mental picture reacting to a situation, you can notice that any rising emotion is only in response to the expectation of what used to be there. Letting that shadow go, you can choose to reach underneath your expectation, into the positive being of your unfettered core, shifting your relationship to the old picture rather than loosing power to it again. Your spiritual core is outside the mental-emotional loop, and provides access to the deep feelings of joy and certainty. Giving these your attention brings them into awareness, in place of the old emotions.
Learning to release the emotions associated with mental pictures and beliefs, frees you from looping. Learning to pause your emotional responses to mental expectations, you remember that feeling inside yourself can be a wonderful experience, a joyous dance with yourself, rather than something to shy away from with fear and resistance. You become free and empowered to show up for everything in your life, as your whole essential self to think and to feel from joy and enthusiasm, uniting your head and heart in a wonderful creative partnership, free from the limiting associations of your past.
Freedom.
(© 12/2012)
