Your Emotional Barometer Can Help You
Your emotional barometer is your body. Every emotion is felt through experience and understand in your body. You need courage to face your emotions head-on.
Usually, we don’t understand how or why, but understanding is vital for dealing with the things that hold us back, and the only way to understand our emotions is to face them head-on.
When you’re navigating your everyday life, it’s useful to understand that your emotions are literally just a barometer of how well you are surviving. That is all. So if somebody walks in tomorrow with a contract for a movie you’re probably going to be pleased. Your emotions will do somersaults, and you will feel all the excitement and anticipation inside you.
Survival Prospects
Why? Because your prospects for survival have been enhanced. “Here’s 100 thousand for making this music”, your survival is enhanced, you feel happy. Or if some gorgeous person you fancy comes to you and says, “you’re the most attractive person I’ve ever seen, I want to go to bed with you.”, you’re going to feel pretty good about that because it is, again, about survival and power.
For a man, you’re disseminating your seed and are potentially creating more copies of you. That’s what it’s all about, all the time. Similarly, if somebody comes to you and says, “I’m afraid you’ve got terminal cancer,” then you’re gonna be pretty distraught because it’s diminishing your power of survival.
That’s all emotions are; they’re just measures of your survival at any particular moment in time.
See Reality As It Is Not As You Want It To Be
One of the things you have to do is to see reality in little bits. You can then see what this huge machine called ‘you’ is doing while it operates unconsciously through time. More importantly, you can also understand where your possible escape route is because there is an escape route. But it depends on how much you value your freedom and inner peace. Real freedom is freedom from your emotions, from your passions, that is what freedom is. There’s no other kind of freedom. That’s the freedom that we’re all after. So, freedom means not being devastated if things go badly and it’s also the freedom not to get carried away when things go really, really well. It gives you calmness within yourself by understanding the way things actually are in life.
The whole thing is about power and freedom; that’s really what the work here is about. The work is your work, it’s not a once a week session and you’re cured. It’s about you understanding your life and the way you live it, so through the understanding and appreciation of what is healthy and unhealthy for you, through this work, you are better able to live an authentic life that is true to you.
Are You In Denial?
Most people are in denial about how they feel. We don’t want to feel envious, we don’t want to feel shame. Enjoy the shame, revel in it, lay about, and surround yourself with it. It’s important to do that because while you’re trying to deny it, you’re making it stronger. The only way to deal with these things is to let them have full throttle and just suck the energy up consciously. There’s no point in doing it in your head. This emotion exists in your body. When you think it, that’s just mechanical, but to consciously try and grab the whole thing up…. “so I slept with somebody [else] last night and I’m just a terrible person. Fuck, I’m such a dreadful person. I’m surprised that anybody has anything to do with me, I’m such a shit” ramps the whole thing up.
How Successful are You?
One little ditty of “what you resist tends to persist” sounds like bullshit but it isn’t. It’s actually a really, really important point. Whatever you’re resisting in yourself will grow. It’s just the way it works. So whatever emotions you have, indulge them as far as you can. That way you become more familiar with them and you become more comfortable with them. When you have self-harming emotions, when you avoid them, they just come chasing after you. Emotions are just a barometer for understanding how well you are surviving.