Following on from yesterday’s blog post, I’d like to clarify….. My life is my research lab. Sometimes it can seem that people who write stuff have a kind of advantage, stand above, and are somehow beyond the ups and downs of everyday life. I know I’ve tended to think that these “experts” don’t suffer the slings and arrows of emotional upheaval or get besieged with thoughts that don’t serve them.
My personal philosophy is “Don’t look up to anyone. Don’t look down on anyone”. People are people, and what we all have in common is our suffering. Never assume anyone is beyond this.
The thing that may distinguish one human from another is the skills they have developed to get beyond the mire. Even in the darkest depths, we all have the capacity to rise above. What marks people apart is their commitment to do this rather than wallow. And some of us have not learnt this yet, for whatever reason. There is no room for blame or judgement. Where each of us is right now depends on where we’ve been.
And.. we all have the capacity to bring the future towards us, build ourselves the way we want to be, learn and grow as a matter of conscious intention. Whatever the pain we carry, there are skills we can learn to bring joy and lightness into the darkness.
Emotional intelligence means integrating thoughts, our cognitive abilities, and our feelings, what makes us human, to be smarter about how we handle our feelings. Gaining self-awareness, we can learn to know and recognise the patters of frequently recurring reactions and behaviours. We can get better at identifying how we are feeling, thereby being more in touch with our experience as it occurs, right now.
Rather than getting hooked up in a “mental-emotional reaction pattern” (Tolle), we can think outside our own box, hover strategically over our reactive self, and harness the power of our feelings as a strategic resource. To do this we need to connect with a deeper sense of who we are.
Beyond the MERPS, we have strengths, noble goals, values and qualities to draw upon. We can make choices in line with this sense of our “higher” self with a sense of possibility and creativity.
By learning to deal with our own MERPS better, we gain empathy for others, get better at becoming what I call “outwards-facing”.
“Everyone you know is fighting a battle inside you know nothing about. Be kind, always.”
Connect your daily behaviour and choices with this conscious intentional, self-aware sense of who you are. Thoughts and feelings together, bringing understanding and compassion to ourselves and those around us.