Activating Emotional Choice

Article extracted from a workshop & book called:

DO YOU BELIEVE IN YOU - by Dieter Luske© - Gold Coast

... all following articles, are written as workshop manuscript
... questions were asked to stimulate active participation.

ARTICLE NUMBER - 23 - Chapter Three

EMOTIONS AND THEIR FUNCTION

ACTIVATING EMOTIONAL CHOICE!

(Overcoming Depression and other emotional linked issues)

Knowing what you know now about emotion will help you to creatively choose emotions best matched to whatever you need at a specific time. What you know now is the key to open the door to your emotional choice - it is Emotional Awareness.

You are aware that there are more emotions than just 'good' or 'bad', and you are aware of the functional aspects of some emotions. You are further aware of expressing an emotion, so that you really feel it. If you are happy, express it and if you are angry, you better express it too, or you may be taken for a doormat, show your anger appropriately, don't lose your temper.

To learn from your emotions you have to let them out, otherwise you just feel good or bad. In expressing an emotion you bring it to life, and that brings your mind, body and spirit into harmony.

Let's go, and change some emotions.

The oldest trick in changing an emotion, such as over reactive anger, is counting to ten.

I am sure everybody has done that sometimes in their life. It works, and the reason is: Emotions are bound to time. Knowing that and being aware of it, means you can ...

Slow down a fast emotion - and - Speed up a slow emotion.

We talked about anxieties before and also mentioned apprehension, and nervousness is another). What these emotions have in common, is that they are fast emotions.

Your heart rate is usually up, and so is your breathing pattern. Your speech and movement are also fast and uneven.

If you are not hysterical yet, it means that you still are in control.

Use that control and; move slowly, breathe deeply and slowly, talk slowly and with a deeper voice.

Going even further, you can actually deliberatly slow down your thinking. (time warp)

If you do that together with counting slowly to ten, your emotions will have calmed down that much, that you have to watch that you don't fall asleep!

NOTE: Whatever works in one direction, will work in the opposite direction.

Speed up a slow emotion like lethargy, boredom or even depression, by starting to think faster, breath faster and higher (chest), speak faster and higher and move faster.

It is quite amazing how you can change your emotion by just changing your speed and even more so, by adopting a different behaviour.

You also can change your Behaviour with an Emotion, or you can change your Emotion with your Behaviour.

Are you a good actor? - Now is the time to try it out.

If you act depressed - looking down, breathing deeply into your abdomen, or walk and sit bent over, it will be only moments before your emotions will get you down and you will start to feel lightly depressed. - And it also works th eother way; when you act confidently, joyfully, you will start to feel that way.

You could say 'it' catches on.

Emotions are bound to a time Frame as well, not just fast and slow, but in regards of how we experience Past, Present and Future, by feeling specifc emotions in a specifc time frame.

By changing the Time Frame, like from past to future or the other way around, you can change the Emotion.

If you feel bored in the present, dream up the future with the emotion of anticipation.

I personally feel that with most emotions, once you come back into to the 'here and now', you can achieve control.

Most emotions are triggered by Past or Future Thoughts (movies) in your mind. So, come back to the present and feel what is appropriate to feel right now. If you feel bored, good, there is nothing wrong with that either, feeling bored long enough, should be that boring that you want to get out of it.

That is the positive function of boredom, to bore you out of it, to motivate you to do something else. There must be a reason for feeling bored, so, learn from it, it means you have to put something else into your life, or even better, check what else you have on the inside, undiscovered or suppressed.

Don't hesitate to act

If you act with awareness, then it is you who does the acting, you are not pretending to be anyone else.

Having mentioned depression, we may as well discuss the functional attributes of depression.

DEPRESSION

Getting depressed about something? This can be all right, particularly if there is a good reason, feel the depression, this is O. K..

If your depression is not lifting, ask yourself: "do I want to be a victim?

Depression is not helping me. What can I actively do, to overcome the circumstances which have started this depression?"

For example: if it has anything to do with your living conditions, then let the depression feeling become the activator for changing those living conditions.

If you hate your depression, hate it strongly enough to let the feeling propel you into action.

THE POSITIVE FUNCTION of depression is to motivate you against that what you feel is depressing.

NOTE: Often the emotion of depression has no apparent cause.

Often people are depressed without a specifc cause, it may be even somehting brain chemistry relayed that everything looks black.

If there is No cause, people still will know if they like that feeling or not.

Not liking depression could become the trigger point for getting out of it. If this feeling (or any other feeling for that matter) is strong enough, then you can use it to travel back in your mind into your past to find the point when you first experienced depression (and therefore remembered that feeling of depression).

This first depression was a negative learning experience and has now to be seen in a different light. Seeing that same experience through the eyes of the present you, may now lessen its hold on you. By now that original learning experience probably has no meaning anymore.

Most people deeply in depression show the depression in their body language, eg, bend over, looking down.. etc. and deeply in their feelings.

Therefore, by physically looking up, they may see mental pictures which are resultiing in depression.

Knowing how behaviour can overtake emotions, why not act your way out of it, by looking up, standing up, standing straight, visualizing something positve inspiring in order to chance form being depressed to feeling a mor epositve mood.

Depression is not all in the mind, everything we get confronted with, needs to be seen holistically. The depression may as well be caused by a chemical imbalance, an allergy or some other bio-chemistry problem.

One more suggestion which often helps with chronic depression is to make use of the time when you are not depressed, to actually create strategies to get out of depression.

Anybody with really deep or chronic depression needs help,

.. as they would be even too depressed to read. That sounds too depressing, so let's do something about it, let's have a look at more ways to actually change an emotion.

Continue ... for the next Article click > Triggering an Emotion

Article provided by the Editor - Dieter L.

Excerpt from a workshop & book - published 1993 - titled; "Do you believe in You"

www.usenature.com - Dieter Luske ©

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