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The 7 Minute Course in

Emotional Intelligence

Introduction

This is difficult territory for most of us to explore simply because there is so much confusion surrounding what we mean by emotion. To the average psychologist emotion is a healthy energy or state and a natural expression of the self. But to someone with an understanding that has it roots in authentic spirituality, emotion is always an unhealthy sign. Emotion can be seen as the price we pay today for making the mistake of attachment yesterday. The rest of us are pretty much confused and find it almost impossible to clearly define emotion let alone fully understand the source and effect of this energy. And yet, in the context of our relationships emotion forms a large part of the energy that we will exchange with others almost every day. Here then is a very short course on the very big and deep topic … your emotions!

1 Defining emotions

Before we can venture further into the land of emotions and feelings we need a definition. Try this. “Emotion is the disturbance of the energy of your consciousness when the object of attachment is either damaged, threatened or moved” Sorry it’s a bit long – it’s both a definition and a description. A shorter definition appears in the dictionary as ‘agitation of mind’. It’s quite simple really. If someone walks up to your car with a coin in their hand and scratches your car down the side, what do you feel? Anger would be most peoples response. Anger is a form of suffering, it is pain at an emotional level, it is a disturbance of your consciousness. And it is self created. Why? Because you are attached to the car. You are not only attached to the car you are identified with the car. If I scratch your car and you feel pain you are basically telling me that you think you are a car!! You are utterly confused about who you are, but you are not aware of your confusion because you are lost in your own emotional disturbance. How can this be? The car is in two places at once, out on the street and on the screen of your mind. If you explore any emotional experience you will find that it happens because you are attached and identified with what is on your mind. If you did not attach to the car and lose your self in the image of the car that is on your mind, there would be no disturbance. This applies to all the things that we learn to get attached to including houses, people, money, places etc. Unless you see this and unless you accept responsibility for all your emotional disturbances, unless you learn to change your relationship with all the things you have learned to get attached to, you can completely forget emotional intelligence! You will be too disturbed too often to ever cultivate such an intelligence properly. The basis of emotional intelligence is seeing exactly why you create this inner disturbance and accepting full responsibility for it.

• Question: In relation to what do you become emotionally disturbed and why? (if this question is tough read the above again)
  
   
• Reflection: How would you feel and what would you do if you were not attached to anything?
  
   
• Action: What will you do tomorrow to free yourself from your self-created emotional disturbance?
  

2 Naming the emotions

Most learn to create the following forms of suffering or disturbances within their consciousness. Anxiety, tension, fear, terror, irritation, frustration, anger, rage, sadness, melancholy, depression, worry, powerlessness, hopelessness are but a few of the many painful emotional insperiences! If you take a moment to look and see the root cause of each one you will see it is because of some form of attachment or misidentification which takes place in your own mind. Each week hundreds of thousands of fully grown mature men will spend 90 minutes disturbing themselves as they watch their team at play! One minute the high of excitement and the next moment the depths of despair. We have been taught to believe this is good, normal and healthy, but it is not – it leads only to addiction to the stimulation of the spectacle because we have become addicted to the emotional disturbance in our minds and the chemicals they stimulate in our bodies. It also blinds us to the truth that we ourselves create every single emotion that we experience. Instead we belief that the other people and events are responsible for our emotional states. When people hear this they immediately think that without emotion life would be without feeling and meaning, a cold and isolated existence. In fact the opposite is true. Free of emotional disturbance we are able to ‘feel’ more and better, care deeper and better We also re-learn how to motivate ourselves instead of being dependent on external events to stimulate motivation within us. Emotion is the lazy mans form of motivation. There is very little power in emotion. It always fizzles out fast! 

• Question : Why are the emotions mentioned in the second sentence above extremely unhealthy? What others could you add?
  
   
• Reflection: Imagine watching a sporting event without emotions, how do you feel, what do you feel, what are you doing internally instead of using the external events to disturb yourself?
   
• Action: Where and when can you practice this detached observation in real time?
  

3 So what is love and what is happiness?

Neither love or happiness are disturbances or agitations, so they are not emotions according to our definitions here. They can be seen as core states of the self or soul. They exist and emerge naturally from the human heart when the heart is free, clean and clear i.e. when it is not attached to anyone or anything. Love takes many forms, from caring to comforting, from empathy to compassion, from acceptance to appreciation. (see The 7 Minute course on Love) As does happiness, whose deepest form is contentment. The ability to express and feel those forms of love and happiness is totally diminished by any emotional disturbance. Unfortunately we are somewhat confused as once again we have been taught to mistake sadness for love, excitement for happiness, worry for care and fear for respect. The process of unconfusing ourselves and understanding ‘the what’ and ‘ the why’ of our emotions requires time spent in practices such as meditation and self-reflection. Exploring the territory of feelings and emotions is not a group activity, it cannot be understood through the words of others, only in the experience of oneself. Here are some reflective questions to encourage your exploration and understanding.

• Question : Remember the last time you were emotional about someone – what were the thoughts and beliefs behind the emotion? What were you attached to?
  
  
• Reflection: When have you seen someone to be at their most loving, was it when they were emotional or when they were calm and focused?
  
   
• Reflection: Why would you think true love is not emotional? (even if you still believe it is imagine for a moment it is not)
  

4 So what are feelings?

Feeling is something you do, not something that happens to you. Unfortunately we have been taught to believe feelings happen to us. It starts young when we see our first circus or similarly thrilling event. It is there that we learn two fatal lessons. First, to believe that excitement (stimulation) equals happiness, and therefore happiness comes from excitement, which it doesn’t, and second, that our feelings in life must always come from outside ourselves. It’s down hill all the way from there! The dictionary defines feeling as ‘perception by touch’. We can feel at three levels. We can perceive and touch at three levels – physical, mental, spiritual. At the physical level you feel the texture and quality of what you are wearing right now. This is perception by touching or feeling using your senses. At the mental level you are also using your mind and intellect to feel the quality of these ideas and concepts. This is completely internal and invisible as you feel the rightness or non-rightness i.e. the quality of these ideas as you allow them into your consciousness. At the spiritual level we are able to feel the energies around and within us. We are able to pick up the vibrations of another and perceive/feel their state. The deepest spiritual feeling is to stop what we are doing right now, take our attention inwards, and in one second feel our own inner peace. All these forms of feeling we can master, and if we do, we will free ourself from all forms of emotional disturbance. And if the remnant of old emotions are triggered you will simply say “I feel angry” as you perceive and touch the presence of anger within. But the moment we move into a state of detached observation of our anger it will begin to die. All emotion dies under observation, and observation has already begun when we say, “I feel angry”.  

• Question: What is the difference between emotion and a feeling?
  
  
• Reflection: Why do you find it so difficult to choose your feelings
  
  
• Action: What could you do tomorrow that will strengthen your ability to choose to be the master of your feelings?
  

5 Controlling your emotions

There are five essential steps to emotional control and mastery. Although the complete process will eventually happen in seconds in real time, it is essential for our process of learning to break it down and see what is required at every step.

Step One – Awareness

This simply means being aware of the emergence of the subtlest of emotions which, if left unchecked, will grow into significant disturbances. For example irritation leads to frustration leads to anger leads to rage.

Step Two – Acknowledge

Which means taking responsibility for the emotion by understanding and acknowledging that I am the creator of the emotion, not someone or something else.

Step three – Acceptance

Fully accept the presence of the emotion without resisting it in any way. If it is resisted it simply becomes stronger, or is suppressed for another day.

Step Four – Ascend

This is the moment of full detachment from both the emotion and the inner source of emotion. In the process of detached observation the emotion is losing its power. And it is only through detached observation that the emotion will begin to dissipate and eventually dissolve.

Step Five – Attune

This means returning our attention to the very centre of ourselves where our inner peace and power are to be found. This is the purpose of meditation.

• Question: What is stopping you from meditating every day?
  
  
• Reflection: Imagine you are able to choose what you feel at all times what choices would you make …when and where?
  
  
• Action: How will you begin, with what feeling and where?

6 Reading the emotions of others

The ability to pick up others emotions is something we can all do naturally. Some of us learn to do it with ease when we are young, usually at our mother or father’s knee. Others have experiences in childhood which made them shut down this capacity and shut out another’s feelings. Either way, here we are now, and it’s only in the now that we can learn. The fastest way to learn to be sensitive to and identify others emotional states is to learn to read our own. If we cannot inwardly read and identify our own emotions it will be impossible to do this for others. This is an ongoing process of self-awareness and self-realisation, not to the point of self obsession, but with a deliberate purpose focused by the question, “What am I feeling right now”? This process gradually increases our capacity to empathise. The great danger of getting too close to others emotions is that we fall into them and create the same emotions ourselves. This is often seen as one of the pillars of friendship in an emotional relationship. But to fall into and create and experience the same emotions as another is not empathy, and it doesn’t help them climb out of their disturbance. Hence the need to practice ‘detached involvement’ a process whereby we stay sufficiently detached to be able to accurately read and understand the emotions of another while staying sufficiently involved with them so we may offer our help to them. The use of questions helps them become aware and gradually detached from their own emotional disturbance, and thereby pull themselves out. This is empathy in action. Sometimes it’s called therapy!

• Question: Why do you think we find it hard to empathise and easily fall into the emotional state of the other?
  
  
• Reflection : Imagine helping a colleague at work tomorrow through an emotional crisis – what do your thoughts look like, what feelings do you have, what are you doing?
  
  
• Action: Identify the two emotions that you felt today and what can you do to ensure they do not arise, at least as powerfully, tomorrow?
  

7 What moves YOU?

The Latin root of ‘Emotion’ is motus anima which means the spirit that moves us, or energy that moves us. That energy, that spirit, is the self. We move ourselves. However, if we use something other than our self to motivate our self, or allow anything outside our self to motivate us then we are not masters of our own life, we will not be the authors of our own destiny. If we are the master of our thoughts and feelings then we are the primary movers of our self and everything in our life. To ask what motivates you is to ask what moves you, which is to ask what does the self use to motivate or move the self. Most of us have learned to be motivated by extrinsic or external factors while a few have discovered that the deepest motivators are intrinsic. We can consciously use our values to motivate us. We can use our thoughts to motivate us, and we can even use memories of yesterday to motivate us today. However the deepest motivator for any human being is a clear sense of meaning and purpose. This can only arise when we know who we are, where we are and what we have at the deepest level. This is where emotional intelligence flows into spiritual intelligence. Spiritual intelligence is based on a true sense of self as spirit not form, as soul not body. Only in this state of self-awareness are we able to discern the true meaning of things/events/circumstances and only then are we able to see our purpose. But that, as they say, is another seminar!

• Question: What gets you out of bed in the morning?
  
  
• Reflection : If someone asked you what is the meaning of life, what would you say? What could be your highest purpose in life?
  
  
• Action : Research the true meaning of meaning, and the meaning of purpose at a spiritual level.
  

Any Questions?