30 tips in 30 days: #21.

The ManKind Project says that we can distill emotions into five groups — happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and shame, what they refer to as “glad, sad, mad, afraid, ashamed.” Each feeling is really a cluster of emotions, like frustration, resentment, bitterness, rage, and hate being part of the anger group. Love, joy, pleasure, and bliss are forms of happiness. Identifying an emotion by type helps me choose how I want to feel. I use my head to support my heart. If I am sad or mad, I can choose to keep feeling that way, or I can shift into feeling glad. I can indulge a feeling or choose to shift my emotional state.

Choosing my emotions requires being alert enough to my feelings to command my emotions instead of my emotions commanding me. One of the reasons I’ve returned to stage acting, in fact, is to improve my ability to genuinely feel any emotion at will.

I monitor my emotional patterns, especially all of my compulsive reactions — even if after-the-fact. Unless I learn how I tend to react emotionally in stressful situations, how can I unhook my emotions from past pain? How else can I be free to choose what I feel?

Our challenge is liberating ourselves from those protein peptides triggering unwanted emotional reactions. We can say that we do not wish to “promiscuously worship” alpha males any longer, for example, but when life feels insecure, our authority addiction still kicks into gear, doesn’t it? We may go through the motions of self control , but are we in control of our emotions or are they in control of us? Does our mature inner adult govern our lives or does our wounded inner child? Only you know what’s true for you.

If you wish to help create a quantum shift into global consciousness on our planet, please share with others this excerpt from my book: GLOBAL SENSE: The 2012 Edition: A spiritual handbook on the nature of society and how to change the world by changing ourselves

If you wish to read Global Sense, please visit Amazon.