Letting Emotions Be Your Guide

<p>A few weeks ago, I was speaking with a friend who thinks the whole thoughts-feelings-actions thing is too cerebral, and she said, “emotions are intelligent and show us deep truths!”</p><p>And I thought, totally! They show us our <strong>thoughts </strong>which show us our most deeply held beliefs -some of which we may not be conscious of. Deep truths.</p><p>Emotions and thoughts: They aren’t mutually exclusive.</p><p>But I ALSO added that I believe they tell us truths about how we are living in alignment with our truth or not.</p><p>There are four foundations of mindfulness. Today I want to talk about the second foundation of mindfulness, which is that of feelings/emotions. More specifically, <strong>how being mindful of our emotions can help us gain wisdom into our truth.</strong></p><p><strong>First, it’s important to remember that emotions aren’t bad in and of themselves.</strong> It’s what we DO when we feel them that often cause the suffering. Not the emotion itself.</p><p>Practicing mindfulness of emotions helps us to learn about ourselves and our mind and not get <strong>hooked </strong>by the emotions themselves.</p><p><i>So, the first benefit of mindfulness of emotions is… being less reactive.</i></p><p>Researcher Benjamin Libet discovered that the part of the brain responsible for movement activates a quarter-second before we become aware of our intention to move. There is then <strong>another </strong>quarter-second before the movement begins. Tara Bennett-Goleman called this, “the magic quarter-second.”</p><p><strong>Within that ¼ second of time lies the chance to do things differently instead of just doing what our default mode would have us do.</strong></p><p>We <strong>also </strong>have a stream of <strong>physical </strong>sensations and sense experiences AND a stream of feelings. We often don’t notice the feelings until they are strong and overwhelming us, <strong>but emotions are wanting to tell us what's going on internally all the time.</strong></p><p><i>So first, emotions will often tell