Emotions Are Dashboard Indicators

Emotions are compelling. Some of them, like anger and love, compel us to saddle them and ride. Others, like anxiety and insecurity, compel us to think even more and develop worst-case scenarios, what-ifs, and possible solutions.

Emotions awaken us to our bodies, bringing us present to the life pulsing through our limbs and heart and skin. Emotions often feel good too. Even some of the “bad” ones like self-righteousness, anger, and even fear at times can bring pleasure, satisfaction, and that good feeling of being right.

A turned on emotion sometimes feels like spirit itself speaking through us. I just open my mouth and the emotion says everything I need to say, or I don't say anything at all because the emotion is holding my mouth shut… Except that our emotions aren’t necessarily special messages from our true selves telling us how we should respond or react.

Emotions are more like indicator lights on the dashboard of our awareness. And like most indicator lights on our car dashboard, emotions are nearly always pointing to something internal to our system, something in here and not out there. This bears repeating: nearly always, emotions are pointing to the internal status of our thinking and well-being and not to external conditions.

1. Emotions point to the internal status of our thinking: Our experience of the world out there is always and inevitably filtered through our thinking. This may not always be our conscious thinking that we can immediately see or hear in our minds, but it’s thinking nonetheless.

Source 1, 2, and 3.

Ever see a stick while hiking, mistake it for a snake, and have a moment of freak-out? You freaked out because you thought it was a snake. Ever tense up when someone you’re not fond of stepped into the room? Thoughts about the person led to that. Ever get angry when your 12-year-old leaves something out on the floor despite your having told him repeatedly to put it away, and then you kick it and nearly break your foot? The pain itself didn’t cause the anger; thinking did. (And yes, my foot hurt for a couple days after…)

2. Emotions point to a shift in our well-being: our natural state is relaxed, aware, engaged, and healthy. When we move away from that state, our emotions prickle and eventually flare to indicate that something’s off. We usually look outside ourselves and react through our emotions to some perceived external threat.

While there are external threats sometimes, nearly always the threat is actually internal: we’ve stopped listening to the wisdom of our relaxed, inner sage, and have instead begun following our conditioned thinking.

We have a choice in how we respond to emotions. Rather than being compulsions to act, our emotions are indicator lights warning us of a deviation from our natural state of relaxed engagement. From this natural state, we are much better able to hear our always-present inner wisdom.

Emotions are quite a gift. Ride them as much as you'd like, but don't forget that they're really pointing to something within yourself, not something out there in the world around you.

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️

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Thanks to Joe Bailey for the dashboard indicator analogy in his book The Serenity Principle.

Playing Someone Else's Role

When I was about four years old and playing in the ocean, the undertow pulled me deeper and I lost the ground from underneath me. I saw the lifeguards in the distance, but they didn’t see me, and I was paralyzed - I couldn’t save myself. My mom reached from out of nowhere, a bit of fear on her face, and rescued me. Growing up, whenever I was in a scary situation (in class, among peers, or otherwise), I knew I couldn’t handle it myself and I needed someone to rescue me.

When I was about five years old, something happened when I was in the basement reaching for a board game and I realized that I am a problem solver.

Again when I was about four years old something happened with some groceries my mom brought home, and I vowed that ever after I would be a good boy.

The past is a memory, but we don’t leave its experiences behind us. In fact, the reason it looks so much like the past is what’s made us who we are is that the decisions and interpretations we made in our past experiences get misfiled in the future, and we live into them over and over and over again. (This is one of the introductory lessons in the Landmark Forum weekend workshop.)

It’s the simplest act of survival: we find ourselves in a threatening or challenging situation, so we figure out a way to help us avoid or succeed in such situations in the future. Something happens and we plop a lesson for ourselves out there in the future, a decision on how to act or who we will be, so we can live into it again and again to avoid the threat or failure that we experienced before.

This is actually a really powerful strategy to survive. Of course we’d like to avoid threatening situations in the future, and of course we want to succeed when we’re faced with challenges. So yes, let’s use these strategies going forward, but let’s also be aware that there are two drawbacks to this mechanism.

First, as my student Myles discovered, these effective strategies to survive can also be constraining. When we are unaware of the mechanism and we live into these strategies without observing the mechanism at work, we identify with the strategies, they become who we know ourselves to be, and they may limit our abilities to act in the moment. We become typecast in the experiences of our own lives.

Second, we become characters in the story of our lives, playing roles designed by our former selves. This can be fun and dramatic and thrilling at times, but there's a drawback: the spirit of our true nature and our ability to thrive and choose no matter the circumstances withers; more often than we'd like, we become no more than a role that we’ve predetermined that we must play. Sometimes the characters we play are happy, enlivened, and in action in life. At other times our characters are despondent, tired, and dissatisfied with playing the same role in life regardless of the set, co-stars, or scene.

Perhaps all we are is actors in the stories of our lives. Even so, when my role is defined by the decisions of 4- or 5- or 17- or 39-year-old me, or defined by a culture I inherited, my experience in this story is rather limited. Get grounded, bring your thoughts to the present, and act bravely, thoughtfully, and freely. There’s not really a future “out there” anyway.

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️

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Thanks for joining me on this exploration/reflection! If you'd like to receive blog updates via email twice weekly, be sure to subscribe here.

You Are Not Your Past

I enjoy troubleshooting problems with my students. It could be code that’s not working, a physics solution that didn’t come out quite right, or a design challenge that needs a special mechanism to get the thing working. It’s an opportunity for me to model problem-solving techniques with my students, and it’s also really fun.

I was on a call yesterday for a school counseling class I’m taking, and as we discussed a case study, one of my fellow students said, “It’s so fun to psychoanalyze people!” And it clicked for me that the thrill that some of us feel in psychoanalyzing ourselves or others is very similar to the thrill for me in troubleshooting code, physics, or design problems.

The key difference is that people don’t actually need to be psychoanalyzed to be freed from our limitations. Our “problems” don’t need to be reviewed and analyzed, and we don’t have to find the bugs in our past programming to achieve present and future ease, satisfaction, and well-being.

Most of us take for granted that we’ve accepted a model that who we’ve become is a sum of our past experiences, the things we’ve done, the things done to us, the people who raised us, the kids we were friends with, the thoughts we’ve had, the support or lack of support we’ve received, the struggles and success and failures and love and hurt and sadness and joy that we’ve experienced along the way. The past, just like our DNA, is an immutable force determining who we've become.

We are beings who live through time, and our memories seem like perfectly valid explanations, descriptions, and stories about how we’ve become who we are. By sifting through and interpreting our pasts, we can determine who we are. This model is flawed, however, and all we need to do is look at our present experience to see how.

All that I have ever or will ever experience is in the present, the eternal now. In Get Grounded Before Taking Off, I wrote about what makes up this present experience of now, and here’s a summary:

My present experience is made up of sensations and thoughts (and their fascinating and moving combination called emotions). That’s it.

Impulses, hopes, desires, fears, and passions all arise in the present and compel us to act. But when we experience those is always right now. It’s not any other way.

So where does my past actually exist? It exists in the present in the form of memories. Most of our memories are stories, visual and verbal thoughts and interpretations about what happened. Some of our memories are sensations, muscle-memories and tensions stored in our physiology. This is true of trauma too; trauma is an emotional (psychological & physiological) response to something that happens, and it gets stored as memory in our bodies and minds.

We have great, detailed, and explanatory origin stories about how we came to be the way we are. We have judgments about ourselves, others, and the universe itself based on those stories. We have thorough and seemingly accurate interpretations of all those experiences. And it all feels like The Truth about ourselves.

But let’s not confuse the story of who we’ve become with the person we are.

Who I am: the space in which Thought, Sensation, and Emotion arise. It’s who I’ve always been and who I always will be. A space of awareness in which feelings and stories and interpretations arise. I am the white space in that diagram above, the space in which my experience arises.

I am not the stories, the thoughts, the sensations. I am the space in which all of that arises.

From this understanding, anything becomes possible.

I hope you have a great day. ❤️

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Thanks for joining me on this exploration/reflection! If you'd like to receive blog updates via email twice weekly, be sure to subscribe here.