Emotional Intelligence 2.2 Self Awareness contd..

How Self Awareness Affect Our Lives

You cannot change or control your emotions. You can learn to accept or release them; this would need self awareness.

Emotions control our thinking, behavior and actions. They also affect our bodies. When you have an emotion you know that you can feel it in your bodies. If you ignore it, it stays stuck in your bodies until free yourself from it.

Most of us have been raised to repress our emotions and this is the way we live our lives. We were raised to believe that certain emotions are bad and they have to remain hidden. Then when we became adults we do not even know how we are feeling, we lack self awareness.

I lived most of my life repressing emotions and the day that I decided to sit down and feel them. I could not do it. I didn't know the difference. How do I feel? Angry? No, sad? No, I do not know.

Your emotions control your thinking, behaviour and actions. What are the results of your actions? Have you ever regretted and action you have taken? Why? because you usually take action according to the predominant emotion you are having.

We are afraid of our feelings, because we do not want to loose control, or we do not want to feel the pain. How do we repress our emotions? Have you noticed that when we experience a situation that is painful or difficult we look for something else to do? Like get busy, think about something else, eat something, etc? When we do this, what we are doing is avoiding the emotion and replacing it with something else.

The emotion remains in our bodies until we finally find a healthy way to release them.

Six ways to avoid feeling emotions:

1. Ignoring the feeling,
2. Over eating
3. Over exercising
4. Using tranquilizers
5. Excessive drink of alcohol
6. Excessive reading or TV
7. Excessive Smoking

Anything that takes us away from the pain will do it. So, you need self awareness to finally gain emotional freedom? Because, if you don't release them, they will control your lives.

Nobody will make us to feel better except ourselves. Have you ever noticed that people with a lot of negative emotions like anger, envy, revenge, etc don't have any energy? People who are able to release these emotions are lighter and expanded and have a lot of energy within.

Have you ever noticed that when you are happy you have a lot of energy within you? You can think more clearly, you can be present, etc. I think this is the main reason why we need emotional freedom. We cannot go around being angry and trying to smile and appear to be happy because we won't be able to do that, and if we try it will take a lot of energy and we will end up exhausted.

Most of the problems you face and keep you always in the same place is because you are not able to deal with you emotions. Have you ever listened to somebody talking about a past hurt, and when you asked when did that happen?, they said: Oh! Around 20 years ago. How can you live a fulfilling life is your are still stuck in a 20 years ago hurt, full of resentment and revenge?