My emotional self has many different sides, as many as there are different emotions and feeling states of being. When it’s scared or stressed, it wants to watch a movie and eat chocolate chip cookies, fresh baked are best. It is happy when I’m watching a stream flow down a mountain valley, or the clouds float through a blue sky over the peaks. It reacts in the moment to what is happening, fresh present time emotions, that come and go, varying like the Colorado weather. It also carries old things, memories, patterns, unresolved feelings from all ages. These old things often shape my present experience and responses. Until they are complete and resolved they are triggered and awaken, to protect me, plague me, or simply seeking resolution and release.
We all have an emotional self, though your experience of it may vary a great deal. Often we think of it as an inner child. As young children our emotional body develops first, before the mental body. As adults we associate emotional behavior with childhood. Conversely, as the emotional body is mostly developed and patterned in childhood, those characteristics, memories and associations, predominate. It has, however, a potential to mature and come into power as a more aware and refined emotional vessel than that of a small child.
On the spiritual path this is a part of our work. Helping our emotional body to complete, contextualize, and release the old things, especially the pains and fears, reduces its interference with your daily and spiritual life. Healing your relationship with its childlike qualities, you can also develop a more aware and coherent emotional body, expressing your soul and experiencing the world as a mature adult.
Consider your relationship with your emotional body. How do you treat yourself when emotions arise? or the old feelings want a cookie or a gun? We are trained as “adults” to associate with our mental body, with our thoughts and rational discourse. Do you tend to talk down to your emotional body, to lecture or explain? Think of how effective a reasoned explanation would be to a terrified three year old.
Feel into how you communicate with your emotional self when s/he shows up. Imagine how you would react as an adult, as a young child, to that same type and quality of communication.
The balance here, as with real children, is to respect that aspect of yourself (especially if no one really has before), but also to remember that its essence and therefore its communication and understanding is emotional. You will get further using emotions, feelings, and tones, more than words. If it is fearful, before reasoning away the fear, or bribing it with a cookie, take some time to sit with it, appreciating, but not matching, the fear, and wrap it in a sense of safety, based on the emotional truth of your adult reasoning and experience. Resist any temptation to retreat out of feeling the emotion, to other levels of your being, abandoning your self. Instead, call them in to support you in creating safety.
Learn to call up compassion, to find the love that is naturally in your heart, even in the midst of grief, and invite that in. Practice a new relationship with your emotional body, using emotional communication. You will even enjoy your cookies more fully, eating them for pure pleasure, rather than as a desperate attempt to avoid an unpleasant feeling.
(© 6/2013)
