I posted above about the sentence from
Opening. What I wrote were my off the cuff thoughts on in, to try to get some idea of what I thought and what it means. It was a very rough rough draft. When I was finished, I wasn't very content with the results. It's not that I was ashamed of what I wrote or anything...but I knew I needed to do more work on it. So, I called a friend of mine and gave her the portion about advanced control of emotions and mind. We only had time to talk about the emotion thing, so I am going to post what we came up with--mostly her--for emotions and save the other components for another time. She will be useless with the energy part of the question, so if you want to address that, I would really appreciate it, but if you are too busy, I know someone I can talk to about it next week.
so: what does it mean to have advanced control over the emotions?
First off, my friend, N, didn't like the word "control." Neither did I. "Control" often means limiting choices. You don't want limitations. You want expansion. If we're in control of ourselves, we have a wide range of choices and we select from those. Probably regulation would be a better word? "Advanced control," however, is better than just "control," because it opens up a wide range of options for times and place.
There are two issues to consider regarding emotion:
1) expression of emotion
2) experience of emotion.
We want to develop self-regulation of emotions, and I think that regulation pertains to both expression and experience. We want to move from REACTIVE emotions to self-regulation.
In terms of expression of emotions, we come upon the idea of "impulsiveness." That's the opposite of control. But it's not that we want to avoid being impulsive; it's that we want to choose WHEN to be impulsive and HOW. So, above you said you were giving me something out of impulse. That was a CHOICE. It was fine. It was helpful. It was kind. It was wise.
My friend said you can control anything if you have a wide range of choices.
Because emotions come quickly (from the reptilian part of the brain), they can help us decide things quickly. If there is a lion in front of us, our emotions help us to act.
The speed of experiencing emotions is useful for problem-solving.
Both of the last two paragragh get into "mind," and I want to do that later, so that's all I'm saying here about those points for now.
#1 for emotion was expression of emotion.
#2 is EXPERIENCE.
Just as we have choices for expression of emotion, so do we have choices about experience.
Feelings are as complex as thoughts, and like thoughts, you can decide what you feel--that is, what you experience yourself and the degree you experience it. An example would be helpful here. Recently the charity I contribute to has made a few mistakes. Rather than allow their mistakes to ruin my day, I thought about how much better things are this year than last, and I shrugged off their errors, which really weren't that bad. I CHOSE to not let the errors get me down. Of course there were thoughts involved that helped me feel the emotion I wanted to. Thoughts, feelings and behaviors are all intertwined.
Emotions are more manageable if you relax against them--experience them. If you try to prevent emotions (which some may think is what it means when you talk about controlling your emotions), you're stuck defending against them and then the emotion has control of your process.
A strong negative emotion evokes
1) strong fear--it's life or death!--we think
2) wanting to defend against the emotion.
To regulate our emotions we need to
release our defenses against them
and
feel the feelings
Time and place matter, too--sometimes we want to hold off for awhile or go somewhere "safe" to experience them. When I was teaching, once a student yelled at me in the hallway. It was really pretty horrible. I had to tuck my feelings in and go back into the classroom and teach. The students inside the classroom had heard the yelling, and so had the secretary across the hall. That moment was not the time to feel or act on my feelings. It was hard to go back into the classroom because my hands were shaking, but I did. I had to regulate my feelings so that I could teach. If I had felt the feelings even more than I was feeling them, I wouldn't have been able to teach. Later I felt the feelings and dealt with them.
There's more to say, probably, and even better ways to say some of it, probably. But I've covered some important points, and if you've nodded off, that's entirely okay, because even though I'd love to share this if you're interested, I'm primarily writing it because I needed to respond, to think over, to develop some ideas about that line from
Opening. I've done that. Now I think I should rest the rest of the day.
