How To Navigate The Power Of Your Emotions
New Insights On How To Understand What Your Emotions Are Communicating
Peace Overtures Today is a weekly newsletter dedicated to guiding individuals on their personal quest for inner peace. Each week, I share a movie that helped me discover balance. It’s a process of awareness and healing that leads to sparks of joy. I’m sincerely grateful to have you here with me.
In 2013, we completed our book, Taming Your Dragons: Making Peace with Your Emotions It was a four-year journey aimed at understanding the power of emotions and their role in navigating our lives. The following are some insights we learned while writing our book and a powerful Alignment Movie Process (AMP) film.
If you’d prefer to listen to the podcast based on this post, check it out here:
Emotions are often categorized as either "good" or "bad." There is a prevailing notion that emotions such as despondency, anger, grief, and fear are inherently negative and should be avoided at all costs.
However, this perception is not entirely accurate.
Emotions are labeled as "bad" primarily because they are frequently expressed in a destructive manner. Each emotion can be viewed as a point on a scale, ranging from the most negative to the most positive emotion imaginable.
In Taming Your Dragons, we developed an emotional continuum, comparable to a number line, to illustrate this concept.
It's important to note that the ranking and order of these emotions are not set in stone; they serve as a basis for discussion. The ranking and order may vary depending on an individual's unique emotional system and life patterns.
Every emotion serves a purpose. Each one provides valuable information about our current position on the continuum and the thoughts we have been entertaining.
Imagine this continuum as a number line, with despondency (-6) at one end and joy and love (+6) at the other. You can find yourself at any point along this line, even at a negative value like (-1). The so-called negative emotions we often perceive are simply reference points on the opposite end of the scale.
When you understand that being at (-5) is not inherently wrong but rather a reference point indicating your current state and direction, you can free yourself from judgment of your feelings.
This realization is crucial because many times we pass judgment on our emotions, which leads to a reluctance to accept them. As a result, we either suppress them entirely or seek ways to avoid them through various forms of addiction, such as overeating, excessive shopping, or engaging in sports as distractions from what we truly feel.
When this occurs, we become disconnected from our powerful guidance system. To realign ourselves with the potency of our emotions and to utilize them effectively as navigational tools, we recommend a fantastic Alignment Movie Process (AMP) film called "The Giver" (2014).
In the film, The Giver we’re introduced to what seems likes a perfect community, without war, pain, suffering, and differences or choice. At first appears to be a utopian society but is revealed to be a dystopian one as the story progresses.
The Giver is directed by Phillip Noyce, starring Brenton Thwaites, Odeya Rush, Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Alexander Skarsgård, Katie Holmes, Cameron Monaghan and Taylor Swift. The film is based on the 1993 novel of the same name by Lois Lowry.
Following a calamity referred to as The Ruin, society is reorganized into a series of communities, and all memories of the past are held by one person, the Receiver of Memory. Since the Receiver of Memory is the only individual in the community who has the memories from before, he must advise the Chief Elder, and the other Elders, on the decisions for the community.
On the day of graduation, everyone is assigned a career. Jonas is briefly skipped, as he has not been assigned a career. Instead, Jonas is to become the next Receiver of Memory, and progressively receive memories from the past receiver, The Giver (Jeff Bridges).
Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) is a 16-year-old boy who is anxious about the career he will be assigned (along with everyone else).
It’s a little freaky how they assign the careers in a massive stadium. As each gets their life assignment The Chief Elder, played by Meryl Steep says “Thank you for your childhood”.
It’s spooky and weird.
As you watch The Giver, look for these five key guideposts on how to navigate your emotions.
Your Emotions Are a Powerful Compass
Think of your whole emotional system as a totality. Everything is related, similar to the body. Emotion is the lynchpin to the whole system because everything is interconnected and interrelated. Your emotions let you see how your body, mind, and soul are responding.
Your emotions link your mind, body, and soul. They are a very tangible way to recognize what is going on with your whole person.
Your Higher Self, or Spirit, is the part of you that is part of God. Spirit is referred to by different names in each tradition, such as the Buddha nature, Christ-consciousness, Purusha, Allah, etc.
This part of you never changes and is the source of all creation. When you allow this energy to flow through you, this part of you that is truly spirit revitalizes your soul, and that gets reflected out in your thinking and your physical body. Until you allow that energy through that is spirit, you can’t revitalize your soul.
You’re stuck with the energy as it is. This is how your soul learns and develops.
The soul, mind, and body are the inputs, and the emotions are the outputs.
Think of your emotional system as an overall compass, because emotion is a condensed representation of what is going on. You might say,
“I have to look at my thoughts; I have to discern my what my gut feeling is, or what is going on in my gut.”
When you think in terms of how your body is responding, how your mind is responding, you have to think about how your spirit is responding. Your emotions give you a condensed way of looking at that, because it represents the totality of that response.
We are not generally aware that our emotions are continually providing this level of sophisticated information. It’s the ultimate canary in the mine, because you’re getting multidimensional feedback.
Your emotions could be giving you feedback on any one of these levels.
It’s as if your emotions are the output coming from any of the levels of mind, body, or spirit at any given time. It’s like getting medical readouts from your physical system, your mental system, and your spiritual system – they all converge in your emotions. From that standpoint, you have one of the most sophisticated guidance compass. It is a wonderful way to condense that output.
This compass is like a powerful internal Intuitive GPS built right in called the emotions.
Notice in the movie, how no one is in touch with their emotions. As a result, they don’t have a feeling sense of what’s working, what’s right, and what’s wrong. In fact, their almost all numbed daily through their morning shots taken (which are monitored by the collective).
For the most part, individuality and diversity is gone too. There’s no awareness of joy, pain, love, and peace.
Expand Your Awareness Through Your Emotions
The Giver shows us in the extreme what happens when you’re cutoff from your emotions altogether.
But how can we expand our awareness by following our emotions?
Emotions unite all parts of your system: body, mind, and soul. Think of them as a power source that goes very deep within the body. You have your spiritual part, your mental part, and your physical part.
The emotions are the way that you connect all these parts.They have great power. If you do not acknowledge them, you negate the very part of yourself that wishes to be integrated.
Without your emotions providing feedback, you’re missing out on a powerful tool.
As New York Times columnist David Brooks says about selecting supreme-court justices:
“Decisions are made by imperfect minds in ambiguous circumstances. It is incoherent to say that a judge should base an opinion on reason and not emotion because emotions are an inherent part of decision-making. Emotions are the processes we use to assign value to different possibilities. Emotions move us toward things and ideas that produce pleasure and away from things and ideas that produce pain... the emotions serve as guidance signals, like from a GPS, as you feel your way toward a solution.”
When you acknowledge the fact that all emotions are trying to tell you something. Emotions let you know what your current interpretation means to you. They also let you know what your gut feeling is telling you. Ideally, you want to come to a point where you trust your emotional response, instead of ignoring it, which is what typically happens to most of us.
We’ve been taught that some of the emotions are acceptable and some are bad, and this varies based on our home and culture. Socially acceptable people only allow that society’s so-called good emotions to be expressed.
Your goal is to allow yourself to feel what you feel and then discern what generated the feeling. What is your body, mind, and spirit actually saying? Is it allowing you to process something you don’t understand? Is it allowing you to see that perhaps you have gone astray?
Have you made an interpretation that produced anger but does not really serve you?
Is it allowing you to see that you made an interpretation that will lead to peace?
Is it allowing you to see the grooves in which you regularly get stuck? Think of your emotion as the spice of life – why not use the whole range?
Can you see how the emotions can expand your awareness of you, your patterns, and allow you to understand others better?
As Eckhart Tolle writes in his book, The Power of Now:
“As you become more conscious of your present reality, you may suddenly get certain insights as to why your conditioning functions in those particular ways.”
As Jonas continues to receive the emotional memories from The Giver, portrayed by Jeff Bridges, he undergoes a profound transformation, experiencing the complete range of emotions: joy, fear, war, and happiness - all within a short span of time.
This immersive experience rapidly expands Jonas' awareness, leading him to realize that the concept of sending individuals to "elsewhere" is not what he and the rest of the community believed it to be.
With his newfound discernment, Jonas recognizes the need for change and sets out to formulate a plan that will enable others to break free from their limited perception and become aware, much like he is.
Ultimately, it all boils down to awareness. Without it, attempting to navigate through life is akin to traversing blindfolded amidst dense fog. Alternatively, we often tend to seek external sources to blame for the obstacles we encounter, instead of looking within ourselves.
Stop Seeking Validation From Your External World
In The Giver, the entire community is trying to conform or fit in. They have a tremendous amount of rules that are being repeated throughout loud speakers as the movie progresses.
The community is focused only on doing and following the rules. You don’t see anyone creating something new like art or architecture. It’s all bland and predictable.
There’s no recognition of spirituality or God.
No one is connected.
If you’ve been following our podcast for sometime now, you know our shows are about aligning with the heart - or in many ways you could say aligning with your Spirit.
It’s ultimately a spiritual journey we’re talking about.
But this journey is unique for everyone one of us. No two paths are the same and all roads lead to home.
So when we seek external approval from our friends, family, spouses, and others in our community for the walk to peace we’ve embarked on - we’re asking for trouble.
What do we mean by trouble?
For most of us, we have biases and beliefs about what is the proper way to live, worship, what is the right type of job, and we have extremely rigid definitions of success.
When you embark on your own journey to peace, it’s an unconventional trip. Your parents might object, your spouse may get concerned, and friends will most likely weigh-in and judge what you’re doing or should be doing.
I have been on this journey for over 15 years and I continue to get judged about what is legitimate an what’s not. When I’m getting myself caught in seeking external approval for this journey, invariable this song shows up in numerous places:
People say I'm crazy doing what I'm doing,
Well they give me all kinds of warnings to save me from ruin,
When I say that I'm o.k. they look at me kind of strange,
Surely your not happy now you no longer play the game,People say I'm lazy dreaming my life away,
Well they give me all kinds of advice designed to enlighten me,
When I tell that I'm doing Fine watching shadows on the wall,
Don't you miss the big time boy you're no longer on the ball?I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round,
I really love to watch them roll,
No longer riding on the merry-go-round,
I just had to let it go,
If you’re truly seeking more awareness by following your emotions, you have to look within and discover what your emotions are guiding you to do or not do.
If you don’t, you’ll be stuck like most of the community we see in the movie The Giver.
Or, you could find your world falling apart because you followed the conventional norms of society’s judgments and expectations. Which is a path on thin ice. As Roger Waters from the band Pink Floyd wrote in the song called The Thin Ice - from The Wall album:
If you should go skating
On the thin ice of modern life
Dragging behind you the silent reproach
Of a million tear stained eyes
Don't be surprised, when a crack in the ice
Appears under your feet
You slip out of your depth and out of your mind
With your fear flowing out behind you
As you claw the thin ice
This is why we recommend find your spirit team of peace group to join together. So you don’t get disoriented, reactively worry about what others might think and can let go into discovery a deeper awareness within.
Recognize That Expanded Awareness Isn’t Far Away
When you begin the process of paying attention to your emotions, honoring them and then discerning what is going on - you’ll quickly begin noticing expanded awareness.
It’s analogous to the young woman named Fiona in the film who stops taking her daily shots and she can begin to feel again.
For most of us, we’re unaware that we’ve been stuffing or ignoring our emotions. We assure you that once you begin to see the power of this inner guidance tool, the awareness kicks in quickly.
For example,
When a leader in any organization can access the full range of emotion, they have more capacity for empathy towards their team and an enhanced perception of what is truly going on.They become more aware of the cues their body is giving them and can come up with creative solutions to problems. The purpose of this emotional awareness is internal guidance.
It’s highly strategic!
This guidance heightens a leader’s perception of what they are being told and how it is being delivered. If you have the capacity to experience and understand the whole range of emotion within you, then you can discern if you are getting a gut response or if someone is just reacting.
You can ask yourself, “Was there a thought that got impeded there? Am I reacting to it, or am I discerning?”. You also have more empathy to help lead others when they get stuck. The better you get at this, the more you trust your emotions and your gut reactions.
As you fine tune your new emotional GPS or Compass, remember this next and last key point:
Let Go, Allow, and Communicate from The Heart
Now that you’re beginning to learn the power of your emotions as an elegant guidance system. There’s are some operating guidelines that will help you on your way.
First
Let Go. Remember we said we’d be talking about this during the entire series? Well here we go again.
When navigating your emotional guidance system, we have a tendency to get stuck in our old patterns of biases and beliefs. These distort the clarity and the guidance we’re getting from our emotional experience.
Usually you know it’s time to let go when you’re ruminating over and over again about some unpleasant experience you’re going through. You may even be reactive or not sleeping well.
This is always a sign to us that it’s time to Let Go. There’s really no other explanation to this step - it’s simply let go.
The next step is to Allow.
Allow yourself to be led. You might think that things will always be the same and that relief will never come. However, that’s because the only frame of reference you have is the way things have always been. This is where you have to be willing to go into the place of the unknown. But you can’t get there if you don’t allow yourself to discover a new path. When you allow yourself to be led, you’ll relax a little, you’ll notice that others will come to assist you, you won’t have to figure everything out, and you’ll get guidance from many different places.
Relying on your mind to figure out the solution limits your options and usually deepens the pain. Remember, your mind’s options are limited to your current life experience.
Finally, Communicate From The Heart
When you speak from the heart, you are matter of fact about how you deliver your comments. It’s usually from a place of confidence and a knowing that others are able to hear as your truth.
Someone that communicates from the heart isn’t trying to please others or look to them for approval.
You can view communication with others like peeling a hard- boiled egg. The egg is the person, the shell is their story, and it takes time to break the shell a part. Every person’s way of cracking the egg is unique – no two are the same.
Think of the grooves as the shell; you identify with it to the point that you think you’re the shell, when in fact you’re the egg inside.
The egg is your true self.
We want our heart to lead because the heart makes all the emotions okay. They’re all acceptable and they’re all transient. This way we make everything that is going on okay and prevent the mind from judging us and invalidating these emotional states.
This keeps things lighter and out of our emotional grooves.
When communicating, seek to understand other people and don’t rely on your assumptions. Too often, we make assumptions about what people say; we don’t slow down and ask clarifying questions, and this is the source of much of the communication breakdowns that are happening right now.
The Key Energetic Benefits from Watching The AMP Film The Giver:
Enhancing Your Intuition and Trusting Its Accuracy
Gaining a Deeper Awareness of the Messages Within Your Emotions
Recognizing the Optimal Functioning of Your Emotional GPS When Connected to Source
Letting Go of Biases that Hinder Your Connection
Releasing the Significance of Others' Judgments on Your Spiritual Journey, Career, Marriage, and Life Choices
Willingness to Reawaken and Embrace Deep Emotional Sensations
Breaking Free from Mental Overthinking and Getting Unstuck
Dissolving the Barriers Surrounding Your Emotions
Rediscovering the Power of Profound Love
Embracing Lightness, Empowering Yourself, and Soaring with Your Emotions
If you haven’t done the Intention Session, we’ve provided it below. It’s essentially telling your mind and body you want the resonance benefits of this film on your timing, only what you need, and with grace and ease. Once completed then you’re ready to benefit from any of our AMP films, music, and TV sessions.
The Intention Session
Getting started on aligning with this movie session is easy. All you have to do is review these statements and do the modality at the end. Once you’ve completed these, you’re ready to benefit from any Alignment Movie Process (AMP) movie sessions you choose. This includes any movie referred to in our books and blogs.
Say These Statements Out Loud and Then Do Modalities At The End
I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I’m ready to.
I have faith that I’ll receive the benefits I desire.
I’m patient with myself as I make my changes.
I let go of feeling I’m too busy to take the time to read these books and watch these movies
I let go of having to understand how these Alignment Process movie sessions work, allowing me to get the full benefits on my terms and in my timing.
Modalities:
Please do all three of the following actions to integrate this intension session. All three activities are a good habit to embrace prior to beginning an AP movie session.
Nod your head up in down as you would when saying yes.
Drink some water
Slow rhythmic breathing through your nose
You’re now ready to watch your AMP film.