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Mastering our Emotions

03 Saturday Dec 2022

Posted by AjmaniK in life and living, nature, practice

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

awareness, ego, emotions, intellect, mastery, mind, senses

The heavily overcast skies that had brought intermittent rain all morning, ought to have been an indicator for me to delay the morning walk. And yet, the breeze through the partly open window brought a warmth as it fluttered over the ‘morning pages’ of the journal that I had been writing over the past half hour or so. The restless ego nudged me to ignore the distinct possibility of more rain, and off I went around the development, to discover more of Nature’s variations.

I only made it halfway through, before the wind must have shifted, and I saw the first signs of the shift in the form of a multitude of small circles in one of the retention ponds at the end of the street. Turning around, I was now headed back home, but facing rain and wind as they gained speed, painting my face. The heron sitting by the pond must have seen me turn around, as it took off with its ever majestic flapping wings, perhaps towards one of the other ponds in the development.

I was only ten or so minutes into the walk and yet I had already run through a whole bunch of different emotions. The pride in having decided to walk despite the conditions, the annoyance at the onset of the rain, the relief at realizing that I wouldn’t get totally drenched before I made it back home, the exhilaration at the unexpected sighting of the heron, and much more. Ten minutes, and a plethora of emotions, many, if not all of them, seemingly ‘arising out of nowhere.’ Can one even imagine how many emotions we encounter in an hour, in all the waking hours of a day? How many of these emotional waves or currents are we even aware of, before one wave is replaced by the next? What con we do to develop better awareness of our emotions and their origins, if we want to develop ‘mastery’ over their effects on us? Why is it even important to gain ‘mastery’ over our emotions, and are there any particular ones that we need to focus on more than others?

We can begin to address the question of emotional mastery by first understanding the origin of emotions. According to the Ashtavakra Gita, “The ego can recognise the world only through its instruments of sense organs, mind and intellect.” The sense organs are the receivers, the mind is interpreter, the intellect is the instrument of discernment. The ego’s reaction to what the world feeds it on a regular basis is perhaps the seed-bed of emotions.

If we can learn to reduce what is fed to the sense organs, we can reduce the minds vagaries and restlessness, can’t we? If we quieten the mind, we can then refine, purify and strengthen our intellect, can’t we? Slowly but surely, by reducing the influence of our senses, withdrawing them from the world, we can reduce the outer noise and increase the inner signal. It is said that this is the essence of spiritual practice, of spiritual work. The result is that we purify the intellect by slowly getting rid of both, hyper-activity and aversion to activity. Dwelling in purity, the intellect will then be strong enough to control the mind, which will then control the senses, which will then control our emotional disturbances.

By taking back control from our senses, and giving it to the intellect, we can achieve emotional mastery and resilience. What comes next? We will be ready to evolve to the next level of self-mastery — the dissolution of the intellect and hence the ego, and the realization that we are one with the Infinite.

We can all get to realization — let’s begin by working on our senses and emotions, shall we?

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly twitter chat and gathering of the #SpiritChat community, Sunday Dec 4 2022 at 9amET / 2pmGMT / 730pm India. We will discuss emotions and their mastery over tea and cookies. I am grateful to my good friend Gopi Maliwal for the topic suggestion. Namaste – AjmaniK

Nature and its variations have a unique ability to influence our emotions…

Your Spiritual Guidance System

28 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by AjmaniK in life and living, practice

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

discernment, emotions, guidance, intuition, spirituality

Your Spiritual Guidance System (by Christy Johnson)

Our guest host for #SpiritChat this week (Sunday, September 30th) is Christy Johnson (@intuitiveheal) – I hope you will join her for what promises to be an excellent chat. Please enjoy Christy’s blog post below. – Kumud

We humans receive information almost continuously, be it from our five senses, our intuition, our dreams, our desires, or via introception, the awareness of the inner state of our bodies. Plus we have the potential to communicate with angels, guides, God, animals, trees, the Akashic Records, and so forth. Since the beginning of human time, we’ve been surrounded by information and the quantity has increased dramatically with digital information, worldwide travel, and humanity’s deepening spiritual awareness. So how do we recognize and honor our own internal spiritual guidance system? How do we make spiritual sense of the world that may seem overwhelming or meaningless at times?

Let’s begin by exploring intuition. This amazing tool provides us with a knowing beyond brain-based intelligence. What we believe and use to navigate our lives may begin in the mind with exposure to a new spiritual concept or practice but it either gets absorbed or ejected by our intuitive knowing. Spiritual resonance occurs below our heads and with intuition we just know what we know. To honor this gift expands and hones it, allowing you to inhabit your spiritual life with more vibrancy and aliveness.

Discernment partners with intuition. As we move along the spiritual path, we learn that judgment stops flow because it creates a resistance to life. Even judging something as good creates a dichotomy of good and bad where certain aspects of life, which exist regardless of our opinions about them, get relegated as unacceptable. Spiritual discernment allows you to differentiate between what’s true and false for you personally. Discernment, like intuition, grows and evolves as we do. I, for example, did not believe in past lives but today work in the Akashic Records, a soul database containing information from every lifetime of every soul. In my experience, our evolving spiritual discernment tends to either open more possibilities or deepen our understanding and knowing of what we already believe.

Although we sometimes discount them, our emotions can also bring us spiritual information. Emotions can provide feedback as to how our intuition and discernment currently serve us. While most of us prefer to feel the so-called positive emotions like joy, less comfortable ones like resentment, anger, and shame, inform us how we need to tend and befriend ourselves. Neither relentlessly repeating affirmations nor pushing ourselves back to a positive mindset can shift a pattern as efficiently as tuning into our emotional reactions and exploring the messages they contain for us.

Spiritual development deepens our love and compassion for all beings, including ourselves. In other words, our spiritual evolution leads us to fall in love with our soul-level perfection, as well as with everyone else’s. That doesn’t mean we condone harmful behaviors from people who aren’t acting with responsible awareness, instead we return to the collective and personal need to evolve our consciousness while paying appropriate attention of our wants, needs, and feelings. At times on our journey we may need to excavate our true selves from our masks before we can love ourselves or we may need practice accepting what we already know. This evolutionary path toward love and compassion also depends upon our internal spiritual guidance system.

Please join us this Sunday, September 30th, 2018 at 9 A.M. EDT/6:30 P.M. India, as we explore Your Spiritual Guidance System. Please come to connect, learn, and share around how we receive, process, and act on guidance in its many forms.

Dr. Christy Johnson quit her decades-long engineering career in 2010 to open her own integrative energy healing practice. She has a passion for helping clients evolve the relationships with themselves and others via soul level information and energy tools. You can connect with her via her website http://www.intuitiveheal.com or on Twitter @IntuitiveHeal .

Christy Johnson IntuitiveHealDr Christy Johnson (@IntuitiveHeal)

Dynamic Energy of Anger

04 Saturday Oct 2014

Posted by AjmaniK in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anger, emotions, spirituality

The second day of October is a national holiday in India, to commemorate the birth of Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation’s Independence movement. Gandhi is addressed with the venerable word, Mahatma, (Maha = great, Atma = soul), for his steadfast adherence to the practice of of Truth and non-violent resistance to injustice in the form of non-cooperation. This is not to say that Gandhi was a perfect human being, for he is candid and courageous enough to document his struggles with many of his emotions in his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth.

When subjected to racism in his life in South Africa in the late 1890s and early 1900s, it was his sense of anger, outrage and indignation at the treatment of his fellow humans (Indians and Africans alike), that spurred him to action – to organize and fight against racial injustice. Gandhi’s long-term philosophy of Satyagraha – satya and aagraha – translated as “Truth Force”, to fight against injustice, emerged from his decision to transmute anger into a ‘force’ for change. It is this dynamic, mutable energy of anger that helped him through his life, and eventually led to the Independence of India, the “crown jewel” of the British empire.

Let us step back for a minute. We are all, all too familiar with the emotion of anger. Along with lust, greed, pride, obsession and hatred, it forms the “six disturbances’ that have the ability to cause us much anguish. Emotions are different from feelings. Our five external senses, and our five senses of action, help us to feel. To feel, is a life-essential activity. How do feelings produce emotions? There is an energy transfer involved in their production. As BKS Iyengar delineates –

"To feel is a verb. It is something that happens. We all feel. Emotion is a noun, a thing. When we allow feelings to harden and coalesce into emotions, we deny ourselves life’s freshness.” – BKS Iyengar

It appears that when our feelings interact with our mind, that emotions are produced. Some of these emotions tend to get anchored in our memory, and stay so, long after the external feeling that produced them has gone by. So, instead of the fast-moving clouds which play hide and seek with the sun and move on, emotions like anger tend to take on a life of their own. They become like the storm clouds that get darker and darker, block out the sun, and cause us mental, emotional, spiritual pain. The memory of that feeling, that person – that so irritated, annoyed, and maybe even angered us – sticks to us long after the feeling or the person has ‘passed’. The mere thought of them, the sight of them, the sound of them, can set off a rivulet of inner anger, which can turn into a raging river. We flood our inner peace with this stream of anger, and often manifest it as outer rage and aggressive attitude.

These are the two aspects of the emotion of anger – one, channeled by Mahatma Gandhi into Truth Force. The other, which we often find ourselves face to face with, which seems to emerge in a flash out of seemingly nowhere as an emotional disturbance. It takes self-awareness to recognize which form of the emotion of anger is finding dynamic expression in our thoughts, words and actions. Self-awareness can then be used to extricate the roots of those calcified memories that no longer serve us, or only serve us by supplying fuel to anger. So, how do we know for sure that anger does not hold sway over us? In the words of Mahatma Gandhi:

We know we have overcome anger when we refuse to be angry, even when we have cause to be so. – Mahatma Gandhi

I am sure I have overlooked some aspects of the dynamic energy of anger. So, I invite you, dear readers, to share your views on this topic with us on Sunday October 5th at 9am ET / 1pm UTC / 6:30pm India in our weekly twitter chat, #SpiritChat. In addition, I invite you to do a self-evaluation, a self-examination of your major triggers of anger for the next seven days. Just observe, and write about it (and share with us), or journal about it. If you have resources that you would like to share with us on this topic, please include in the comments below. Thank you!

Namaste, and Be well.

@AjmaniK

Final Questions via @AjmaniK :

Ready? Q1. Dynamic energy of #Anger - what is this dynamic? How does it make you feel? #SpiritChat 
http://twitter.com/AjmaniK/status/518748472133316609

Q2. Where does your own anger seemingly come from? Where does it seem to go? #SpiritChat 
http://twitter.com/AjmaniK/status/518749590749970433

Q3. Anger in the face of 'injustice'. Is it justified? If so, how can we make it constructive? #SpiritChat 
http://twitter.com/AjmaniK/status/518751289556348928

Q4. 'Expression' versus 'Repression'. Which seems appropriate for anger for you? WHy? #SpiritChat 
http://twitter.com/AjmaniK/status/518753321776316416

Q5. Think of your last encounter with 'full blown' #anger. What did you learn from it? #SpiritChat 
http://twitter.com/AjmaniK/status/518755106884698113

Q6. What is the 'cure' for frequent anger? Do we even need a 'cure'? Why or why not? #SpiritChat 
http://twitter.com/AjmaniK/status/518756731183452160

Q7. What is the connection between #anger and other emotions like bitterness, sadness... #SpiritChat 
http://twitter.com/AjmaniK/status/518758469005246464

Q8. Have you experienced any positives that came from expression of anger by you? Towards you? #SpiritChat 
http://twitter.com/AjmaniK/status/518759961846108161

Q9. Send a message ~ to those you may have angered, those who angered you... #SpiritChat 
http://twitter.com/AjmaniK/status/518761333907783682

Final Q10. If you have 'anger' resources - books, seminars - please share here, or in today's post bit.ly/scf-1005 #SpiritChat 
http://twitter.com/AjmaniK/status/518762412204638208

Resources contributed by Participants :

OSHO: If Somebody Creates Anger in You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aT_sSY6swY via @GopiMaliwal http://twitter.com/GopiMaliwal

Carmen Marie: My book is “I Will NOT Forgive”. http://thenewhappyme.com/iwillnotforgive on amazon. via @CarmenHappyMe http://twitter.com/CarmenHappyMe

OSHO: Root of Anger bit.ly/1rcfDhz via @GopiMaliwal http://twitter.com/GopiMaliwal

The Stanford Forgiveness Project http://t.co/gTijhShgGQ via @GregMarcus2 http://twitter.com/GregMarcus2

Resources for healing ~ The Power of Your Thoughts: http://t.co/oLGHpy7AKa & The Gift of Suffering: http://t.co/qqrXxmPcAO via @LetMeMoveYou http://twitter.com/LetMeMoveYou

via @AjmaniK:
“When you are aware that you are being triggered, rather than simply reacting, you can remain detached, and separate your emotions from your true self.”

Excerpt From: Edwin Harkness Spina. “Escaping the Matrix: 8 Steps Beyond Stress and Anger Mangement for Attaining Inner Peace.” Free at iBooks. https://itun.es/us/bjJ-F.l

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