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Emotional Triggers
By CinnamonMoon
"Emotions Are Triggers".
Why is this important enough to present it as a course of study?
What
does the statement mean? And how can you apply it to your pathwork?
First of all, though the
premise of the statement is simple, we are complex creatures
and emotions are deep complexities
in our lives. Control over emotions requires understanding and
the ability to manage them well.
Secondly, when we stop seeing them as feelings we begin to recognize
they are our inner spirit's
way of signaling us that something is taking place that is vitally
important to us in some way. We
become aware these same emotions are much more than just what
the feeling itself indicates. Be
it love or hate, joy or anger, passion or complacency, emotions
announce a situation taking place.
They announce our reaction to that situation and they tell us
about the effect it is going to have
on our life.
To acknowledge them as triggers we begin the process of setting
aside the emotional reaction
and start to apply sensible thought patterns and actions to
handle the matter properly. We can
literally flip a mental switch, shut off the emotion temporarily,
and respond calmly with focus
that leads to actions taken with precision. Rather than letting
the emotion we feel cloud our
judgment, we see and think clearly discovering we are better
able to confront the issues we are
faced with. Whether this knowledge is applied to a mundane or
spiritual path, it provides you
with a tool of invaluable importance.
As an example, imagine you are hard at work, there are three
major projects you have your mind
on and the day has been one disaster after another. You are
on a tight schedule with meetings,
calls to make, and a big presentation due at three that afternoon.
The phone rings, and someone
on the other end says: "I am sorry to tell you this, but
the printer just called and they are running
behind, the reports won't be ready until 2:30, and it will take
about an hour to get them here with
traffic. We can't do anything about that. You'll have to stall
the presentation. I've got to run. Talk
to you later." Click. You have already had the office copier
break down and the repairman had to
go back to the shop for parts; two people who were to assist
you called in sick, and you are
carrying the weight of the project yourself. As if this weren't
bad enough, the presentation is to a
board meeting of a new client and the account will secure your
raise.
With your mind running 90mph, you turn to grab a cup of coffee
and spill it on yourself staining
your new suit that you put your credit card to the limit for.
As you reach for something to wipe
off with, you knock the stack of papers you forgot to bind to
the floor and they are now all out of
order. It's not a good day. Frustration is running high and
you can't seem to stop the madness.
The phone rings again and it's your teenager crying and saying:
"I'm sorry, I'm really sorry, you
are going to kill me. I'm sorry. I know I won't get my allowance
for 10 years now. I'll pay for the
damages. I just didn't see the post in the parking lot. It's
only the fender and a headlight...well
maybe part of the trunk, but not much. I've got to go, I'm going
to be late for the ball game. I'm
really sorry." Click.
Another line flashes and you pick up the call. This time it's
your boss telling you that the meeting
has been moved up to 2:00 and you need to make sure that everyone
is notified. There will be no
time for a lunch hour and you missed breakfast. Your head is
pounding and just when you start
to respond to this news you hear a click on the other end. Not
only are you frustrated, you are
feeling angry, taken for granted, overworked and underpaid,
and quite frankly, ready to just walk
out the door to look for another world to step into.
While this is a negative situation, it is a good example of
a bad day and getting hit with one thing
after another. When we have positive emotions they do not seem
as overwhelming to us, but the
negative ones will send our minds and our bodies into a dysfunctional
spin that only serves to
make matters worse. Most people would be reacting with negative
responses at this point. That's
normal, we all have bad days and we all have bad moments. Turning
it around, however, requires
control. How do you undo what seems impossible? You are upset,
perhaps quite angry, totally
frustrated, and the mind is just not quite running on track
at the moment.
Walking a spiritual path you know that the situation calls for
you to center yourself, but you
don't have a moment to spare. You cannot afford to take the
time to catch your breath let alone
shut out the day. Emotions are flaring and you are fuming at
the ears. What do you do? You set
aside those emotions. Just drop them like a bag of bricks right
there on the floor and take the
time to center yourself. You can do it in as little as seven
deep breaths and you will be amazed at
the clarity that begins to come into play. Leaving the emotions
out of the equation frees your
mind of the clutter they create. By setting them aside you are
able to ask yourself what it would
take to turn the situation around. How can you delegate some
of the things you need to do? Can
you delegate them? How can you better handle each issue? What
can wait until after work? What
needs to be done first? How can you put things in order and
create a flow?
Instead of taking the head off the next person who calls or
comes through the door, removing
yourself emotionally from the situation takes a lot of pressure
off of you. It allows you to face
the challenges and confront them with a calm and logical perspective.
Setting the emotions aside,
centering, and relaxing allows you to take a fresh perspective.
You begin to see that you are
sitting in an emotional stew working yourself into a helpless
state. The clock is running and you
are racing time at that point. The more the seconds tick by
the more disillusioned you become
and you start seeing no way out of the situation. It becomes
totally hopeless and you are ready to
give up. OR, you take the two minutes to center and you set
down the emotions to look at things
logically.
From that logical perspective you come to realize that you cannot
change certain facts. People
did not come to work, the printer will be late, the damage to
the car can wait until you get home.
You need to notify others that the presentation has been moved
ahead an hour. So you call on
someone in the office to make the few calls required while you
pick up the papers strewn across
the floor and organize them. As you are putting them in order
you realize there is a way around
this and begin to smile. Instead of getting upset you decide
to put on the presentation orally and
quickly prepare some brief notes. Now you walk into the conference
room, check to be certain it
is in order and bring out the dry easel so you can diagram your
graphics.
At the meeting you wait for everyone to be seated, enter the
room and greet them as you stand in
a coffee stained suit and smile. "Good afternoon Ladies
and Gentlemen, I stand before you in my
humanity, it was not a good morning, but I am very excited about
being here with you this
afternoon. By the end of my presentation you will be given a
little more taste of my humanity as
I will have a bound transcript of all you will hear and see
during our meeting. Meanwhile, there
is a pad and pen before you and you are welcome to take notes.
I do urge you to read over the
transcript you will receive and think about your decision. I
have arranged a conference call for
10am tomorrow morning so you can sleep on this and be under
no pressure for an immediate
conclusion." You smile warmly, and express your ideas as
you watch those around you begin to
nod to themselves in agreement with you.
Not only have you demonstrated that things can go wrong for
you just as they can for those who
are there, but that you have the capacity to make light of the
matter, find order amid chaos, and
ease the pressure on someone else at the same time. The atmosphere
is relaxed, you are relaxed,
and the presentation goes comfortably well. Throughout the meeting
you inject a little humor and
demonstrate your confidence in your ideas and as you conclude
your speech you see the door
open quietly. A delivery person slips in to set the opened box
of transcripts on the chair nearby.
You smile and nod to him as he leaves, then thank those in attendance
for coming. Now you
make your way back to the transcripts as the members of the
meeting gather their things. At the
door you pass out a bound and colorful presentation of all you
have discussed along with one last
smile and a good handshake thanking each person individually
for coming one last time.
After returning to your office you relax with a cup of coffee
and center again before going home
to face your teenager and the damage to your car. What are you
going to do? The car is only two
months old and you are starting to feel anxious. Sipping your
coffee you remember your first
accident and start to smile, the memory of how you felt having
to tell your parents returns and
you know that you are not going to react like they did. This
is going to be different. That night as
you confront the issue you do it with understanding and logic,
arrange for reasonable payment
plan and continue the flow of dealing with the things life has
set before you. Your teenager is
probably in shock, and more than willing to do some extra work
to earn the money. It's been a
long day, and bed welcomes you.
At the conference call the next morning you hear pros and cons
to your proposal but an overall
acceptance to the plan and a genuine desire by all those who
attended the meeting to go ahead
with the project. Your boss congratulates you on your open and
honest approach, your ability to
handle a situation under stress, and tells you your next paycheck
is going to reflect his gratitude
for a job well done. This could well have been a disaster, but
by setting aside your emotions
yesterday, you have made your way to success today and creating
a good impression of your
executive abilities as well as your courage to show others that
you are as human as they are.
All it takes to set aside these emotions is the awareness that
it needs to be done. It takes the
awareness that you are falling into a trap that will only lead
to pitfalls by continuing to let them
run out of control. Setting them aside lifts the load and the
agitation melts away. Getting into the
habit of centering in the morning and evening creates a sense
of balance and you are in better
control, able to cope, and see when the flow begins to shift
in a new direction. It is much easier
then to sense your emotional triggers when they start to go
off and take them in hand. You can
flip the proverbial switch and shift into a logical pattern
of resolution to the issue you are faced with.
Even when we are distracted with worries, when times are their
hardest, this key is going to
serve you well. By releasing negative fears and worries as you
set down the emotional bricks you
start merging into a state of heightened awareness. Centering
is a matter of a few deep breaths
and beginning to see through your pain or misery, of understanding
things from a wider perspective.
For years we have been taught to contain our emotions, to keep
them under a tight rein and not
let them show. I was taught to feel them, see them as a trigger
to highlight an issue, flip that
switch, and deal with it logically. Most people struggle trying
to get a grip on what triggers
things for them. We are all taught to feel our emotions, but
we have to know what they are
telling us or we are blind to using them as tools. They are
very accurate ones. What I've shown
you in the aforementioned example is not so out of the question.
Once the emotions come they
speak of what is truly going on inside us. How we are perceiving,
if we are confused, and what
set them off in the first place. That initiator is the issue
we need to work on.
If you can recognize that and set the emotional peak aside,
reason it out, and ask yourself
questions that will bring you answers, you will find you can
create your own positive flow.
Setting them aside takes away the pain, allows you to center,
and restore your sense of balance.
You are no longer frustrated or agitated, but calm and understanding.
If you are wrong you can
deal with what you were wrong about and do it the same way.
It lets you handle things.
Disassociating from your feelings allows you to embrace the
things that were going through you
and once you have felt them let them go. This is what is done
in spirit retrieval sessions, it's what
is done to remove blockages in spiritual pathwork, and it will
remove those same blockages in
your mundane life. We have to embrace, or feel, the emotions
and discomfort they bring so we
can see what the problem is. We have to see these tools as the
lessons they are, give thanks to
Spirit for giving us this lesson and to our inner spirit for
demonstrating how it is effecting us.
We have the opportunity at that point to receive the enlightenment,
to open our eyes to the
situation and resolve it. Then the emotional issue can be released
without baggage. Centering
will offer you a better perspective, and at that point you are
able to give those feelings back to
Spirit and let them be put to better use. We do not have to
own the agitations. We CAN say
"thank you, I understand, you may have this back now."
We CAN walk away without barriers
put in place around us that we don't really need. There is no
need to beat yourself up, instead you
need to be gentle with "you" and make the best of
a bad situation. It is often the simplest
techniques that take us the farthest and eludes us the most.
Any intense reactions we experience are set off by emotions
of one kind or another for good or
bad. Once we can see this and have the key in hand we can overcome
the situation relatively
quickly. It doesn't mean we can't feel things. Cry when you
need to cry, shout when you need to
shout, laugh when you need the humor. BUT when that is done
and you are through stomping
your feet you need to let it go. Let's turn this around a bit
here. What if these are good emotions?
You get excited and have great news, you celebrate it by feeling
it, and you let it go. You say:
"Okay! That's wonderful! Now let's get busy and do it!"
right? There is no problem letting go of
the high excitement of good news so you can take that situation
in hand and make it a realty for
yourself. But when the news is bad we tend to be blind-sided
and languish in it. We let it eat at us.
Negative energies are very powerful forces because we see them
as personal affronts. We feel
them and own them and the pain they bring is "ours".
Positive energies tend to be perceived as
shorter lived and we move on. I think it is because there is
no pain involved and pain is so
intense, it holds us in place, stops us when things are going
wrong and makes us a target for
more. When it's good we don't feel stopped we feel we have wings
and we take fast flights. We
spend the good energies quickly. Because of the intensity of
negative energies we tend to build
on them, we throw more logs on the fire, and we send them out
like we do the positive ones but
they are wrong and harsh and then others feel them just as intensely.
We begin to attract what we
project. So those forces are easily wielded and when we are
drawing energy in a positive sense
we need to work it up just as intensely.
Most people know all too well how to work themselves into a
negative frenzy. A positive frenzy,
feeling the excitement and the joy, is not something we are
conditioned to focus on. We simply
let that wash over us and feel it and then let it go. The key
here is in holding the positive and
directing it so that its intensity is shared, focused, and sent
out with the same force as you would
a negative one. You have to summon the emotions back then to
do it. You have to feel it,
embrace it, and use those emotions to trigger the proper wielding.
Once the energy is raised the
emotions are set aside and we channel the flow.
Emotions are closely tied to our power centers (chakras), they
are tied to our senses, and that's
why these areas are so intimately linked to one and other. This
is so important to understand. In
this way we can feel our way through our growth cycles as well
as life. It is easy to employ once
it is understood. It brings an instant assimilation and becomes
such a part of you that you begin
not to even differentiate it.
Fear is something that can keep you paralyzed or be acknowledged
and confronted. It is only
what we cannot see that scares us. It is False Evidence Appearing
Real! It is not being able to see
what the outcome will be and so we fear the unknown in life,
in others, in ourselves...an in our
spiritual paths. It is all too easy to give in and let fears
run rampant. We can fall prey to the mind
games we play with ourselves and imagine we are fools, being
taken advantage of, going to fail,
going to lose our hard earned money, that we have no real spiritual
gifts or talents, that we are
not worthy or any number of other things. But, is this the real
truth? Of course not. We are all
equal in the eyes of Spirit and we all have the same rights
to life's blessings. It's our attitudes that
attract or prevent things from coming about so we need to change
them. If we center we restore
the balance of the logical mind and learn to trust the impressions
we are having to guide us in our
actions, then we can take any necessary precautions or action
to rectify a given situation.
When we learn to understand our feelings and emotions and trust
them, when we see the
impressions our senses are giving us, we learn they are powerful
tools, but it takes a clear head to
do that and when emotions are rampant it is a cloudy one we
work from. We need to recognize
the sensations our body gives us. See where the joy, fear, confusion,
anger, resentment, hope,
trust or even wishes are felt so we know what it is saying to
us. We also need to know when we
are taking things on empathetically from others. So when these
issues are made clear through
triggers we gain the upper hand and can really make some serious
progress. Paying attention to
your emotions for even one day will help you learn how you react
to them and what you need to
change.
Every emotion we have is a trigger to something. If you see
it you can change it no matter how
large or small and you'll be amazed! The sense of self-control
just skyrockets. You feel you have
the capability and gain the confidence to stand on your own.
You learn to trust yourself so deeply
and know that you are right in doing so. It really does give
you a handle on things and a
perspective that you would easily overlook otherwise.
Keeping things simple is Spirit's way of masking truths we need
to discover. We as complicated
beings paint those masks. We also make ourselves look hard for
what is standing right in front of
us. Finding it right there hits us and we have the dawning of
enlightenment. It's all around us
everywhere. So when we can't find answers the key is to simplify,
not complicate. We are human
and we all fall prey to that. When we can "click"
on it, we can set it aside like the emotions and
everything becomes much clearer. It's the direct approach to
the bottom line.
The paralysis of fear in the clouding of "what ifs"
holds you back from making progress and
doing what you need to do. But setting aside emotions allows
you intense freedom to act, and
brings with it such a sense of accomplishment, you will feel
the joy throughout your entire being.
Sometimes we do feel like kicking and screaming because things
aren't going our way. In the end
the changes we face are really to our benefit, they build our
character, and they determine the
paths we walk.
Hindsight shows us how insignificant our fussing is. We need
to be aware that no situation is
permanent and we will not always be going through ugly moments.
Seeing there is a choice,
doesn't it make sense to you to use the emotional responses
you get as triggers? Doesn't it make
sense to set them aside and clear your thinking so that you
can see what needs doing, do it, and
be on the other side sooner that if you wallowed in the negative
energies? For me it does, I know
it works, and I know that sometimes it is a challenge to overcome,
but we can do it if we want to.
I hope that you will find your way to seeing the value in knowing
our "emotions are triggers".
When we are faced with negative situations we can choose to
let our emotions benefit us, too.
We can learn to laugh at life, seeing the humor in the lessons
we are being given. That will
shatter the negativity faster than anything else. So whatever
you are feeling look to the opposite
reaction to counter it. Use it to your best advantage and turn
the table around. You will feel better
for it and your life will reflect it in the most amazing ways.
Whether it is mundane reality or the
frustrations of spiritual growth, there is always a way to turn
things around when you have the
eyes to see and those eyes come from putting the emotions aside
long enough to look and act.
Mouse:
Cinn, I have a question about this. I have read until about
half-way, and I notice that I have a
question about emotions/feelings.
For me personally, my emotions are how I CHOOSE, either consciously
or unconsciously, to
express my feelings. To me, a feeling is that voice or sensation
deep down, mostly Love or Fear.
From that, there is a choice in how I express (e-mote) it. Angry,
sad, restless, happy, exuberant,
disappointed, etc. ... Non-Violent Communication (NVC by Marshall
Rosenberg) has a whole
page full of names that I would use to describe my emotions.
I find it very useful, when overwhelmed with emotions, to take
a step back and watch my actual
motivator: Love or Fear. And then I can see more clearly what
I can do to shift the energy.
Does any of this resonate? It is just something that has been
in my head for a LOOOONG time,
and it is something that colors my way of reading about and
dealing with emotions.
I'm going to go do some serious zzzzzzzzzz's now , and will
take time tomorrow to finish reading
this thread. I'm really loving all the new posts you have put
up.
***Finished reading the article.
“When we are faced with negative situations we can choose
to let our emotions benefit us, too.
We can learn to laugh at life, seeing the humor in the lessons
we are being given. That will
shatter the negativity faster than anything else. So whatever
you are feeling look to the opposite
reaction to counter it. Use it to your best advantage and turn
the table around. You will feel
better for it and your life will reflect it in the most amazing
ways. Whether it is mundane reality
or the frustrations of spiritual growth, there is always a way
to turn things around when you
have the eyes to see and those eyes come from putting the emotions
aside long enough to look
and act.”
Humor. In the time of ascension I find myself very quickly fatigued,
my back goes all stiff and
sore, as if I have been doing major physical work and pushed
myself beyond my limits. It
happens every year, and it sort of sneaks up on me, since I
don't really know when it is
(ascension). Then synchronicity or Spirit remind me of it just
a few days before, I realize AH! So
*that's* why! And this year I find Coyote running around me.
Showing me that humor might be
some very good medicine for me now. Yep. Taking myself a wee
bit too seriously right now. So
here's to lightening up.
Cinnamon:
“I find it very useful, when overwhelmed with emotions,
to take a step back and watch my actual
motivator: Love or Fear. And then I can see more clearly what
I can do to shift the
energy....Does any of this resonate? It is just something that
has been in my head for a
LOOOONG time, and it is something that colors my way of reading
about and dealing with
emotions.”
It sure does. That's a great example of what I've been trying
to bring across here. As for that
humor of Coyote, it's great isn't it? LOL. The physical stiffness
is a clue to stress too, so when
you're stressing find something really, really funny and have
a good old fashioned belly laugh. It
really breaks the negative energy instantly and lets you clear
your head and refocus in a much
more relaxed manner. (In fact, laughter has been scientifically
proven to be effective in treatment
of physical, emotional, and mental illnesses.)
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Libraries
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INDEX
Page 3
(Main Section, Medicine Wheel, Native Languages &
Nations, Symbology)
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INDEX
Page 5
(Sacred Feminine & Masculine, Stones & Minerals)
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Text:
© Copyright: Cinnamon Moon & River WildFire Moon
(Founders.) 2000-date
All rights reserved.
Site
constructed by Dragonfly
Dezignz 1998-date
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