Our lives are made up of many many systems that are kept in balance to achieve a certain level of happiness, safety and ease.
The combination and blending of different systems in healthy and elegant ways makes life #good. Done in shitty ways… yeah, you guessed it, life feels pretty fucked.
We take in information at staggering rates all day long. (Approximately 80,000 to 150,000 thoughts per day.) This is every day, each week, 365 days a year and certain parts of our brain is online even in our sleep. All the information we process is judged, categorized, and used to create our reality-good and bad.
We also have emotional responses to all that information we take in. It effects our thoughts and we have corresponding sensations in our bodies depending on how we judge and react to the information that we’re stimulated with. These two things are blended together to help us to have either a healthy, fulfilling interface with everyone and everything around us or not.
So what happens when we have a disproportionate emotional response to information that comes our way? Take a second to remember a time you’ve done this, it shouldn’t be that difficult. Do you remember being gripped by a certain emotional? Anger. Fear. Shame. Were you able to recognize later that the information that you processed was somehow cross-wired with a past experience that accessed an old experience. (I’ve never done this myself but heard of this happening many times.)
Now how about you summon up a memory where you were numb when someone shared information with you. You were distracted, disconnected, or preoccupied by thoughts or some other emotion had taken up the majority of your bandwidth. How’d that go? Did you feel like you had healthy emotional interface with that experience?
Our emotions are almost always hard-wired to specific information about specific experiences. This happens through childhood imprinting and gets ingrained in each of us.
As we gain some self awareness we start to recognize that certain emotions we experience aren’t always the best fit with things we’re wanting to have happen. This can go many different ways.
The solution to this is to separate information from emotions and try on different scenarios to see what might be the better fit. (I’m not scared of telling my significant other how much they mean to me because it is no longer linked to feeling scared.) When we find a better fit in our minds then we start the long process of imprinting new correlations through repetition and effort until it gets ingrained. This is training the mind.
Thanks for your time. Have a great day.