So what are feelings, emotions & beliefs

Feelings

A feeling is a sensation that you feel inside and sometimes around your body. It can make your heart race, cause you pain in your body, make your stomach feel lighter or turn over, make you smile or give you a warm feeling inside.  Examples of feelings are sadness, anger, joy and excitement. 

There are two types of feelings:  

happy feelings: ease, joy, happiness, clarity, confidence, love, excitement, contentment, fulfilment, compassion and

unhappy, negative, reactive feelings: anxiety, feeling low, sadness, anger, impatience, jealousy, frustration, self loathing, self hatred, betrayal, impending doom, weakness, not good enough, unworthy, empty, needy, unsafe, guilt, shame, pain, feeling overwhelmed and more.  Happy feelings are always there on the background and some of a happy feeling can turn into an unhappy feeling because of a negative belief. 

Beliefs

A belief is a feeling of being certain that something is true. 

They are usually deep rooted and can be learned through your own experiences or told to you by others.  You have various beliefs within you about yourself, life and others inside of you. 

The are two types of beliefs: positive and negative beliefs. 


Positive beliefs describe a situation or reality as it is. They are objective. They give you a choice. They are like a transparent glass through which you an see everything as it is – the truth. 

Negative beliefs are false, untrue and subjective. If we perceive a situation from a negative belief we see 180 degrees opposite of how it actually is. They do not allow you to see the whole picture, the situation or reality as it is. By design negative believes reject and do not allow us to see, hear, feel, understand the reality or a situation as it is and if we view the world through them we project them outwards and see, hear, feel, understand the world around us, a situation, ourselves or others through them totally opposite to how it actually is. 

Examples of negative beliefs are: fears, worries, doubts, judgements, unhealthy expectations, unhealthy desires, unhealthy attachments, others. 

When you see, hear, feel, understand the world, a situation, others or yourself through negative beliefs you see through a tainted glass/filter that shows you what is not there and doesn’t let you see what is actually there or what is actually happening. 

Emotions

An emotion is a part of us that is self aware. A person has many emotions. At the core of an emotion always has a happy feeling: love, ease, joy, peace, calmness and can have one or several negative beliefs (fears) and unhappy feelings, caused by the fears, on the surface of an emotion. The core of an emotion is a happy feeling that a negative belief turns that happy feeling into unhappy feeling depending on what the negative belief is about it will turn into a different unhappy feeling. Each emotions has it’s own personality and a unique and quite specific view of itself, a particular situation. It might similar or quite different to the rest of your points of view. It is possible to become completely lost in or identified with an emotion so that it feels as if you are the emotion.  However, an emotion is not actually you it is only one part of you that may be enhanced for a period of time.

Why they are a gift

Your emotions are a gift as they enable you to understand yourself better.  Each of emotions within us is there to help us to learn a lesson about ourselves, others, how to relate and about the life itself. The first step to understanding of an emotions is to become more aware of when a particular emotion get triggered and what triggers.  As you are going about your day-to-day life try and recognise the times when you are experiencing an emotion, you will feel it as an unhappy feeling and work out what triggered it.  Maybe the smell of your morning coffee made you feel happy or perhaps a work colleague made you feel irritated.  It may help to keep a diary or notes on your phone to refer back to.  Notice what physical reactions your feelings cause within you.  Are there certain things that always seem to trigger a response in you? 

Discovering an emotion

The human brain is complex and we have a multitude of ways to prevent ourselves from feeling bad. However, most techniques are short lived.  We can self medicate with food, alcohol etc, we can create a narrative around our emotions and try and excuse ourselves or we can simply push our feelings down and bottle them up so we don’t have to deal with them.  Unfortunately they always come back.  Sometimes they manifest themselves in different ways.  A nagging headache, stomach pain, disturbed sleep, anxiety, feeling low.  We can go to great lengths to prevent emotional pain and avoid admitting it is there and dealing with it. The reason why we avoid again is again our negative beliefs: fears. If we look at our feelings and fears it might mean to you that they are true and that you are a weak person, that you are a failure or others. None of that is of course is true.

To master your own emotions you first need to fully understand them.  The next time a big one comes along resist the urge to make it go away.  Make sure that you are in a safe space perhaps at home or in your room so you can devote some time to yourself without interruption.  If you find your emotions are difficult to deal with or if you are already feeling quite low or depressed it may be helpful to have a trusted friend with you when you try this. It will be easer as your friend can help you to stay objective to not get lost in the emotion.

As your emotion comes to the surface let it come up fully.  Give it as much space as it needs. Allow it to be there. Acknowledge it. Relax your body. Try to not get lost in it so that you can observe it from a neutral place. Take a few deep breaths to relax your body and the rest of yourself. Get to know the surface unhappy feeling that is there. Sometimes there will be several layers of unhappy feelings.

It may be a wave of sadness, or several waves.  Then under the sadness you may feel anger or nausea, you may feel a layer of anxiety.  Try to stick with it so you can feel the full range of feelings and fears and other negative beliefs behind them that are in this particular emotion, part of you.

Don’t judge your emotions, try not to criticise yourself or tell yourself that the beliefs or unhappy feelings in this emotion are not valid or stupid in any way.  Remember that sometimes your emotion (this part of yourself) has a limited awareness and may see itself in isolation to the rest of you. It may have beliefs that are contradictory to your wider outlook on life or feelings and beliefs that you are uncomfortable with.  Treat your emotion as you would a small child. If a young child came to you distressed and explained how they were feeling and why you would not dismiss them harshly or expect their feelings to conform to ideologies or understandings that were beyond their years.

You would listen to them and gently explain why their beliefs and fears were not true with love and kindness.  In the same way you should speak to your own emotions with love and compassion. Let that emotion tell it’s story, it’s unique perspective. An emotion often wants to be heard, listened to and understood. It might share it’s story. Listen to it patiently. Let it fully express itself. Then help it it to see, understand a bigger picture from your point of view.

Help it let go of unhappy feelings and fears that caused those feelings one by one until only essence of that part is reached – ease, happiness, joy, light, love. Then that part of you, emotion, has clarity. It has no negative or any other beliefs in it. It can see a situation clearly.

The happiness, love, peace, fulfilment it was looking outside of itself or through you it will have found within itself. When that happens the next step is to listen to the realisations, understandings that part of you has. Take your time. Write them all down. Do not rush here You will have a feeling that it is over only then stop. Give this emotion a name so that you can recognise it easily if a similar one comes up again in future. You will find some examples of the names in this website. Write down the unhappy feelings, fears and other negative beliefs it had together with the lesson. Keep a diary for all your emotions with a date next to each of them. The dairy will help you see how much progress you have made.

You will be amazed later. It will be a reminder of how far you have come and will help you when you feel down and lost to remember. Keep coming back to this diary and read the lessons you have discovered and keep applying them in your life. Feel how different you feel each time you find and help a part of yourself. This way you get to know and understand different emotions within you and by doing so eventually, all of you. That is how you get to know yourself. Each emotion is like a page in  the book called you. It is the most interesting book that you will have ever read. It is the book of you. Each page of that book is full of mysteries,  interesting realisations and revelations waiting to be discovered. This and adventure of self discovery. A time when all parts of the puzzle of you come together gradually.

Becoming overwhelmed

It is easy to become overwhelmed by an emotion.  When we are in this state it can feel as if we are only the emotion and the feelings and beliefs of that emotion can be so strong we get lost in them and forget who we are outside of this emotional state of being.

The next step is to separate yourself from the emotion so that you can examine it.  Imagine that you are in a changing room with a curtain.  You are on one side of the changing room and your emotion is on the other.  If your emotion is quite strong it may take a few attempts to succeed but persevere until you are able to walk around your emotion and view it as a separate entity to yourself. It might help to focus on your breathing and relaxing your body with each breath. 

Once your emotion has been separated from you it will be easier to work with as you will not be experiencing the feelings that your emotion has first hand.  You will be aware of them but not lost in them in an overwhelming way.

Examining your emotion

Now you can examine your emotion.  What made it arrive and how does it feel.  Make sure to fully examine it.  Don’t just take the initial feelings at face value.  Really drill down through it.  For example it may feel angry, however behind the anger there will be a fear that caused the anger, there may be layer of sadness with a fear that caused it, and beyond the sadness there may be guilt or shame and the fears behind them.  It may have been started by something that happened or something that was said to you a long time ago.  Try to identify what sits at the core of the emotion – the core fear. Do not judge anything that comes up from your emotion, let it have its say freely, without prejudice. 

Remember this is a part of you that needs love and understanding.  Do not chastise or judge your emotion for its feelings and fears or expect it to be rational. You will know when you have fully examined the emotion, during this session, when all the emotional charge has subsided and it has found ease, love within itself. At the end of the session make sure you send love and compassion to your emotion (this part of you). Don’t be surprised if it sends love back to you. To send love imagine and feel your own loving feelings building up inside you (it may help to think of someone or something that you love to help build it up). Once you have that feeling imagine sending all of that love to your own emotion then imagine that the emotion is dissolving or fading into light. Once you have finished you may feel a wave of happiness or love when the emotion is released.

Congratulations

Congratulations you now fully understand one of your emotions.  It will get triggered again but when it does be sure to go through the same process.  On subsequent examinations you may find out even more about it.  After several examinations you will find that mostly (with the exception of rage or anger) each time you experience the emotion it will have less of a negative charge and it will become easier to not get lost in it or overwhelmed by it (even when you are not on your own).  This means that your own behaviour will not be changed or affected by it.