Archive for the ‘ Emotional Hygiene ’ Category

People are very interested in increasing their intuition, and there’s a fascinatingly mistaken idea about intuition in many circles, which is that intuition has nothing to do with thoughts or emotions — that it comes from another place altogether. In point of fact, intuition isn’t otherworldly or extrasensory; it’s clearly an empathic skill that we all possess, and it comes directly from our emotions.

In my post on the gifts of sadness, we learned to channel sadness and access the gifts of relaxation and revitalization it brings us. It is fascinating to me that many meditation systems utilize the gifts of sadness without realizing which emotion they’re using. This confusion about emotions is universal; we’re trained from our earliest days to see emotions as troublesome, or negative, or as the opposite of rationality, intuition, relaxation, or spirituality.

None of that is true, but these ideas get repeated so often that they become self-fulfilling prophecies. When we treat our emotions as problems, they become problematic. However, when we can learn to see them with more clarity, we can find the gifts, messages, and skills they bring us.

Luckily, empaths have the capacity to work with emotions in clear ways, so let’s bring some full-bodied clarity to the intuitive emotion that we’ve all been taught to view with suspicion.

Channeling Your Natural Intuition

For this exercise, you’ll need a quiet place where you can sit or stand comfortably.

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Though you may have caught onto this already, the premise of The Language of Emotions is that all of your emotions exist for specific and protective reasons. All of your emotions carry messages for you, and if you learn what those messages are, you’ll be able to work directly with your emotions in excellent new ways.

We’ve looked at the gifts of anger, sadness, shame, and contentment. Each emotion has a purpose and is necessary to your well being, but some of them are difficult to work with — especially since most of us have learned two ways to deal with emotions that don’t really work: Expression and Repression.

Some emotions are good to express. Happiness and contentment are two that come to mind. Sadness is also nice to express (if it’s safe to cry). Depression can be good to express instead of bottling it up. But think about rage, jealousy, hatred, or shame. You want to be able to feel these emotions, but if you express them, you can hurt yourself or other people.

People tend to repress difficult emotions like these, which is a good idea if they don’t have any other skills. However, since all emotions carry truly important messages, repressing them means you won’t get those messages. You won’t learn or grow; instead, you’ll just become less able to work with the emotions you repress. If you can envision your emotions moving forward to bring you messages and give you help, you can see that repression just shoves that help under the rug. In the case of strong emotions like rage or hatred, yes, repression is better than expression. But since rage and hatred have something very important to say to you, repressing them will actually reduce your capacity for personal growth and awareness.

But again, expressing emotions can be very problematic, as we all know. Expression just tends to train our brains into expressing the emotion the next time, and we don’t learn how to behave appropriately in response to it. That emotion’s message and help move forward, but instead of listening to it, we just throw the emotion out of ourselves in a rush, and we lose the message in the tumult.

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