Primacy of Feelings
What is more important to you, the physical things you can touch or the emotions that you feel? When it comes to what truly makes a difference in life, for most people feelings like love and happiness have much greater value than physical things or mental facts, and personal life experience trumps knowledge every time.
On the day that we are born, our unformed consciousness takes on a body with all of the five senses which then flood into our consciousness. When we are not sleeping, these five senses gradually help us to orient ourselves to the three-dimensional physical world with linear time in which we find ourselves.
As we then accumulate experience with the emotions and feelings of our mother, father, and others surrounding us, our heart and emotions grow and develop. In response to both the physical sensations and the emotions directed at us, we develop attractions and repulsions. The attractions are the things that we like, that make us feel good and sometimes even bring the delicious sensation of laughter. The repulsions are things like hunger and pain that make us cry and call out for help. How these attractions and repulsions play out and are perceived by our newly birthed consciousness plays a key role in how our hearts develop.
Our minds develop much later than our feelings. The mind gradually develops as we start to be conscious of certain patterns of life and make choices based on those repeating patterns. Our minds help us to make choices which allow us to avoid what repulses us and attract what pleases us. The mind eventually develops strategies which we apply in certain conditions to avoid pain and enhance the possibilities of pleasure and love. Many of these childhood strategies become unconscious conditioned responses, which can become a problem as the environment in which we live changes.
The earliest strategies we develop tend to be the most deeply engrained and the hardest to change when we are older. Our minds, through this process of unconscious conditioning, can thus keep us stuck in old strategies or patterns which once worked to help us survive as children, but which may no longer be useful in the world in which we find ourselves as adults.
Based on the deeply engrained strategies we developed at a young age, the mind can convince us when we are grown that something is really bad or wrong for us, or conversely that something is really good for us, when this may not really be the case considering the very different realities we face as adults. The mind can particularly convince us that certain emotions are to be avoided.
All emotions and feelings are powerful sources of information. When a person focuses only on positive emotions while suppressing the negative ones, they deprive themselves of vital information which supports psychological and emotional health.
By first becoming conscious of the deepest early strategies that were ingrained in our minds and then developing intentions to let go of the strategies that no longer serve us, we can change and grow. As we consciously transform patterns which no longer serve us, we become more flexible and have greater choice in moving through life as we embrace all feelings and emotions. We become more free to fully express ourselves in all of our authenticity and to be who we are in the present moment. As we are successful in doing this, the mind becomes more of a servant than a master in our lives.
As we gradually learn to balance the four parts of ourselves, our body, heart, mind, and spirit, life becomes an ever more joyful dance with all that the universe presents us.
For great ideas on transforming old patterns, click here