The Wisdom in Your Feelings

(Text version below audio player)

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to integrate and utilize important information housed within our feelings.

We’ve often been given the message that emotions get in the way or they make us weak, but the opposite is true if you understand how they work.

Our thoughts and emotions are converted into chemistry in our blood, where they rapidly travel through our system as messengers, telling our physiology how to respond to our inner and outer circumstances.

The feelings and thoughts we commonly call ‘good’ ones (because we enjoy having them) create a beneficial environment of well being. For instance, the chemistry of love enhances the health and growth of our cells.

While the ‘bad’ emotions the ones most people don’t enjoy having) such as fear, release stress hormones and inflammatory agents that shut down the growth of cells and disable the immune system – this is because when flight, fight, or freeze kicks in, 100% of your mind and body’s energy goes to saving your life and is focused only on that moment. No need to use any precious life force to fight an infection in your thumbnail, or navigate fears around a possible change in your career while you’re trying to escape from an angry bear.

Our physiology can only ever go in one of two directions = we can go toward supporting growth and assimilation of nutrients as well as new ideas (creativity) – or we can close off to protect the status quo (not taking in anything other than what protects a baseline of survival in the moment). Translated into emotional terms: we can go toward love (openness and creativity) or we can go toward fear (contraction and survival). In other words, we’re either in thriving mode – or we’re in surviving mode.

Obviously there are times when contraction seems like the best choice – however, think of a master martial artist who faces danger with a still mind (meaning they don’t let fear-based thinking get in, which would then shift them into reactionary states and limit their awareness because they go into auto-pilot). A master knows how to choose to be in an open, receptive, expansive state of mind, rather than shut down. It’s proven that we are at our best in such a relaxed but alert state of flow, because we have equal access to all informational input: logical, emotional, body-based, and intuition-based, and we are both fluid and quick to assimilate and act.

We can all become masters in our own right, and learn how to choose a wise state of mind.

There are many ways to learn and practice emotional intelligence, a few of my favorites are: NonViolent Communication (NVC), Rick Hansen’s work on mindfulness, meditation and yoga (lots of methods and styles to choose from), relationship coaching, and finding a mentor – someone who’s communication style you admire.

I’d love to know your thoughts after reading or listening to this blog post. Please consider emailing me with any feedback you have. And thanks so much for being here!