The Crucial Difference Between Feelings and Emotions
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to make choices that aren't influenced by less-than-helpful patterns that we picked up in childhood?
The reality is that most of the choices we make as human beings simply aren't free choices. They are conditioned by emotional programming that runs relentlessly, and mostlyundercover, deep within us.
How many of us have good intentions in all kinds of areas of our life, and yet if we look back sometime later, we see that most of our intentions went nowhere. That's because we were unable to harness ourwill.
We may think we have free will, and the whole of the so-called "free world" runs on this belief, but the reality is that most of us are far from truly free.
Whether we are talking about the way world leaders, and often whole nations, respond to a crisis on the world scene, or to the kind of work we do as individuals, in all sorts of ways we react emotionally, or are driven by emotional patterns of which we have no awareness, rather than making truly free decisions.
If a person were really free, would they choose to commit a crime and end up in jail? No, no one in their right mind wants to be locked up. Yet our whole system of "justice" is founded on the belief that people make their choices freely.
Few on this planet at this point in our species' journey into higher consciousness are able to live with a large measure ofreal free will.
Free will is a terminus, not a starting place. We don't begin free, but we can become free. And life in all its fullness doesn't really get going until we have a large measure of inner freedom, so that we can actualize what we truly want.
We can't think our way into freedom. In fact, we can't think our way into much at all except trouble. Thought is a pretty useless vehicle when it comes to living consciously. Itblocks presence of mind instead of enhancing it.
Most of our emotions are also pretty useless in terms of living consciously. They are driven by patterns that aren't helpful to us and are mostly reactions instead of expressions of who we are in our essence.
We often refer to these emotions as our "feelings." But actually, the ability to reallyfeelis a very different thing from emoting.
True feeling is a capacity of the heart, whereas most of our emoting comes from detrimental brain patterns.
You can see the difference between an authentic feeling state and an emotional pattern that was picked up in childhood by bringing to your awareness a time in your life when you experienced a feeling, and at the same time experienced an emotion that was contrary to this feeling.
As a young boy, I recall times when I wanted to spend time with a friend, but they chose to do something else, and then I felt mad at them and didn't want to have anything to do with them. So at the feeling level I was connected to them, loving being with them, while at the emotional level I was pushing them away in my mind.
On one occasion, for instance, I wanted to go to a Saturday morning movie with a friend, which we had decided to do the previous day. But when Saturday came, I found my friend had gone with someone else. And so I experienced the feeling of wanting to connect, and yet being upset with them and wanting to distance myself from them, simultaneously.
The emotion I was caught up in occluded my true feeling.
The journey to real freedom begins when we start paying attention to what's actually going on inside usjustobserving what we are feelingbeneath the emotions we are having, becoming aware of the differencebut not doing something about it.
The Crucial Difference Between Feelings and Emotions
By: David Robert Ord
The Pros And Cons Of Being A Freelancer Make Her Want YOU Back - 3 Tricks to Keep Up Your Sleeve and Win Back Your Ex Tell me your favorite Lip Balm and Lip Gloss!!? Introduction To Stucco And Coatings Nba Best Picks - The Best and the Worst Morocco And Its Riads The Secret to a Younger and Smarter You The Highs And Lows Of Ceiling Fans The Facts And Elements Of Leather Ulip - Merits And Demerits Stock Assault Torrent Stock Assault 2.0 Review A Great Way To Show Moms And Grandmothers How Special They Are