Article extracted from a workshop & book called:
DO YOU BELIEVE IN YOU - by Dieter Luske
... 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 )
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 sometime in his or her life. It works, and the reason for that is that emotion is bound to time. Knowing that and being aware of it, means you can slow down a fast emotion and speed up a slow one.
We talked about anxieties before and also mentioned apprehension (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 slow down your thinking. ( time warp )
If you do that together with counting slowly to ten, your emotions will have calmed down so much, that you have to watch that you don't fall asleep!
Whatever works in one direction, will work in an opposite direction.
Speed up a slow emotion like lethargy, boredom even depression, by starting to think faster, breathe higher and faster, speak higher and faster and move faster.
It is actually quite amazing how you can change your emotion by just changing your speed and even more so, by adopting a different behaviour.
We learned before that emotion affects your behaviour, and just now, that if it works in one direction, it also works in the opposite direction. This works with everything, even with behaviour and emotion.
You can change your behaviour with an emotion, and 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 depressed. So too it works when you act confidently, joyfully etc. In a way you could say 'it' catches on.
Emotions are bound to a time frame as well. (We mentioned that in our discussion about anxiety). We experience past, present and future, by feeling one emotion on any time frame.
By changing the time frame you can change the emotion.
You feel bored in the present, so 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', the present, you can achieve control.
Most emotions are triggered off 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 so 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.
Often the emotion of depression has no apparent cause.
Sometimes people seem to feel just depressed all the time and everything looks black.
Those people still can know whether they like that feeling or not.
Not liking it would 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 (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 loosen 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 to let them physically look up may let them see what kind of mental picture they are reacting to with depression.
Knowing how behaviour can overtake emotions, why not act your way out of it, by looking up, standing up, standing straight, visualize something to get out of feeling mood, speed up ?
Like everything else, depression is not all in the mind, everything we ge 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 your own strategies to get out of depression, or make use of your depression somehow.
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.
Excerpt from a workshop & book - published 1993 - titled; "Do you believe in You"
www.usenature.com - Dieter Luske ©
