Emotions are one of the most
complex entities to explain in words. They are how the mind communicates with
your Higher Self and are felt directly in the body.
For example, if you are
walking down the street and a stranger approaches you and asks for your wallet,
you will feel fear. Immediately, signals are sent to your brain, and
your hypothalamus is alerted to signal your autonomic nervous system, which
activates your sympathetic nervous system.
The sympathetic nervous system
prepares your body to deal with the danger by increasing your heart rate, and
hence your cardiac output to increase oxygen delivery to your
skeletal muscles. It also constricts the blood vessels to your internal organs,
such as those of your digestive system, which are not needed to deal with the
immediate threat. Your pupils also dilate to enhance your vision
during the threat.
The sympathetic nervous system
also stimulates the adrenal glands to release cortisol, epinephrine, and
norepinephrine into the circulation. This results in the “fight-or-flight”
response, which is manifested by an increase in heart rate, dilatation of the
bronchial airways, and an increase in the metabolic rate, which helps you to
respond effectively to whatever is threatening you. This example shows how emotions,
fear in this case, are experienced in the body.
But what are emotions? What
role do they play in our lives?
Emotions are the language of
the soul. They are experienced in the physical body, because the body is the
vehicle through which our souls experience life on Earth.
Because we have such a wide
range of experiences in our earthly lives, we have a wide range of emotions we
can feel. Often these emotions are not distinct but form a spectrum, much like
how pure light can be refracted into different wavelengths of colors after
passing through droplets of rain. Our emotions can range from utter despair and
desolation to unbridled ecstasy, and everything in between.
Emotions are what give our
life experiences meaning, but they are very subjective and are not an absolute.
For example, you may perceive the loss of your job as devastating because it
was the only source of your income. However, if you take a step back and put
this into perspective, you will start to realize that your job was not
fulfilling, you did not get along with your boss, and were anxious the
entire time you were at work. So although you lost the only source of your
income, it was probably the best thing that could have happened to you because
it was not what you were born to do and was sucking the life out of you. This
loss freed up your time to pursue your true passion and discover your life’s
mission.
You can see how our emotions
are subjective. So even though emotions are what give our life experiences
meaning, it is important to note that it is the meaning we ascribe to
these experiences that is subjective. The problem arises when we take these
emotions as an absolute truth and fail to look for the deeper significance of
the experiences that generated them.
What follows from this is that
there is no such thing as a negative emotion. What, you say?
Did I hear that right? Yes you did. Let me repeat that profound truth.
There never has been and never will be such a thing as a negative emotion.
So how can such emotions such
as sadness, grief, despair, depression, shame, regret, anger, hatred, jealousy,
rage, and fear be perceived as anything but negative? I will try to shed some
light on this issue.
They key here is that our
emotions are our soul’s experience of life situations felt in the
body. If what we experience is perceived as negative, then it simply means that
we have a false sense of being incomplete or lacking something. This
happens as a result of how we interpret events in our lives. But our souls
can never be incomplete or lacking, because they are whole and complete by
nature.
For example, if an intimate
relationship suddenly comes to an end, we may feel sad because we feel a loss
of love. But this is a false perception because love is our souls’ true
nature, so it is something we can never lose. We simply perceive a loss of love
because our soul experiences union with another soul in the physical plane
through the medium of a relationship. This is a relative experience, with the
absolute truth being that your true nature is that of unconditional love.
I will delve more deeply into this in an upcoming chapter.
So if this is true, why do we
feel sad when a relationship ends? It is because we have not yet realized our
true essence as love, so the feeling is necessary to alert us that
there is something greater that we have yet to understand or realize
about ourselves. In fact, this is the purpose of all of our emotions.
Another example is the emotion
of anger, which is usually experienced when something unexpected happens to
us or something we are expecting to happen does not happen.
The truth of the matter is
that there is nothing that can happen to us that we did not intend at a higher
level of being. We only experience unexpected events as such due to a lack
of insight into our multidimensional nature and our highest levels of
intention. On the flipside, when we feel joy, peace, compassion, or ecstasy, it
is a confirmation and a celebration of who we truly are.
The problem arises when we
interpret our emotions as an absolute truth and not a reminder of where we lack
understanding or an affirmation of our true nature. This usually happens when
we have an emotionally intense experience that makes us feel uncomfortable. In
these situations, we often suppress those emotions because of how they make us
feel.
Nauman Naeem MD
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