Here’s a gift for you that can change your life. It is as big a revelation as the shift from a flat Earth map to a round Earth map of the world:
Emotions and Feelings are DIFFERENT.
Until today, you likely used feeling and being emotional interchangeably, not giving the difference between them much thought or attention. If that’s the case, you’ve been missing an essential ingredient for leading a free and natural adult life in which you can create authentic relationships with yourself, your loved ones, and the world. Here’s the difference:
Feelings are for handling the present moment from your adult ego state. Emotions are for Healing. While emotions may feel the same as feelings from the inside, they are not for navigating the present moment. That is because emotions are either shadows from the past or they are not from your adult self.
Read this again.
It makes a huge difference.
When you are trying to handle your current relationships from emotions, you are relating to the situation not as it is now. You might be reacting to your partner or friend as if they were your mother, father or sibling because what they said triggered something in you. Or you might be reacting to current situations for an unconscious, irresponsible purpose of revenge or manipulation.
Emotional reactions aren’t bad. Bringing them into your current relationships simply creates a mess of low drama and stuckness. Bringing emotions into your current reality and treating them as if they were from the present moment won’t change the results. Emotions need to be felt and expressed in a held space. They are doorways for your healing. Then you can meet the other without your minefield going off to whatever they say. You have space to hear them and meet them.
That is where your feelings become relevant. Your feelings are immeasurably valuable resources for your adult life because they have information and energy for you that allow you to know what you want to create and to act on that.
Imagine driving a car with your different selves. Navigating your life from emotions is like letting your child self drive the car. A child that can barely look above the steering wheel, and not quite reach the pedals, let alone knows how to drive at all. The relationship messes that this creates are similar to the car scratching alongside houses or crashing into other people, cars, trees, houses… It is similar when you let your Gremlin, the King/Queen of your Underworld, drive the car. Your Gremlin is out for shadow purposes, so it will drive to intentionally crash into the next tree, to run over the next best cat or even person, to cut corners risking running into the traffic. Your Gremlin at the steering wheel also creates big messes. You really want your adult driving your car to nourish your relationships and navigate your life. Then you can drive anywhere. Adventure awaits. That’s possible when you navigate from feelings.
For that you need to be able to distinguish feelings from emotions, use your emotions as doorways for healing, and learn to navigate your feelings consciously.
You can start to discern feelings from emotions by observing how long they last. Feelings come in waves and don’t last longer than 3 minutes. If you are angry, sad, scared or glad for longer, that’s an emotion. Emotions also often are disproportionate to what’s happening. So, if you notice yourself “over-reacting”, that’s an emotion worth looking into for healing.
If you choose to learn the felt difference between feelings and emotions, and to navigate these, you get on the road to discovery. You get to continuously discover the true human potential in you and those around you. There are many others already travelling on those roads, including myself.
You can learn to feel in Possibility Teams, Rage Club, Fear Club, Sadness Club, Expand the Box Training and Possibility Laboratories, and other offerings that you can find on my website, on Possibility Management New Zealand‘s website, or on Possibility Management‘s global website.
You can heal your past emotions in emotional healing processes. I hold space for those, and so do many other people in the world. Take a look at my Coaching page or check out https://possibilitycoaches.mystrikingly.com or https://createpossibility.mystrikingly.com.
Have high level fun and see you on the road!
