16 - H4H News: Tuning Into Essence with Emotional Awareness





Synopsis: Hope for Humanity News is a series of three to five-minute weekly podcasts designed to educate, inspire, and comfort listeners during these challenging, but hopeful times. 

Hi everyone! Welcome to Hope for Humanity News! I’m Reverend Joan Kistler.

We’ve been talking about how to tune out the loud, demanding voice of the ego and tune into the still, small voice of Essence. We learned a couple practices to help us with this: mindfulness and meditation.

We ended our last broadcast suggesting that the ego not only uses thoughts to distract us from the present moment where Essence dwells but also often also adds a splash of emotion. This makes its thoughts “sticky” and therefore more difficult to ignore. So emotional awareness is another practice we can use to release those “sticky” feelings.

Many people have an unhealthy relationship with their emotions: We either hate them or love them.

When we hate them, we resist them too much, and they can’t be resolved. So, if we’re angry about something, and we refuse to accept it, the anger and the story behind it gets pushed down into our subconscious where it festers and eventually causes mayhem in our lives.

When we love them, we honor them so much that we identify with them. We say, “I am angry,” and then that anger and the story behind it becomes who we are, and then we end up going through life an angry person, which isn’t pleasant for us or the people around us.

So, when we hate or love our feelings, we get “stuck” with them.

A healthier way to deal with our emotions is to accept them, which doesn’t necessarily mean that we agree with them or the story behind them but that we accept the fact that we are experiencing them – because we are. We can simply say, “I am feeling angry.”

You see, we can’t deal with emotions that we refuse to admit we are experiencing or that we have our identity wrapped around so much that we can’t step outside of them and objectively look at them.

Once we admit that we are experiencing something, then we can simply say, “I wonder what thoughts I am believing that are generating these feelings?” Then we can explore the “story” behind the feelings, whether there is any validity to the story, and whether there is any wise action that can be taken.

We might discover there is something reasonable we can do to resolve the feelings, or we might discover that the only thing to do is to learn to accept a situation we can’t do anything about. We can be angry about being stuck in traffic, but unless our car can fly, we really have no sane choice but to accept the situation – and our feelings about it.

We hope you enjoyed these Hope for Humanity broadcasts and found them enlightening, inspiring, and full of hope! Stay tuned to Interfaith Community Fellowship for continued daily inspirational posts about humanity’s awakening consciousness, and never give up hope!

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