META-STATING YOUR EMOTIONS

In the art we have identified three steps:

1) Accept the emotion as an emotion.

2) Explore to understand the emotion in your experience.

3) Let the emotion do its emotional work inside you.

4) Meta-State the Emotion. It is only in Neuro-Semantics that we distinguish primary from secondary emotions. This is not a distinction that you will find in NLP or elsewhere. And the reason is simple: until you know about Meta-States and about self-reflexive consciousness, you will not know how to distinguish the basic primary emotions (of which there are only a few, 8 to 15) from the secondary (or meta) emotions (of which there are thousands).

For developing your ability to manage your emotions, you need to know that the first emotion is not near as important or critical as the second emotion. Given that all of the primary emotions are just emotions, and perfectly acceptable as emotions, their quality, ecology, and usefulness depends entirely on the thought or emotion that you apply to them. Basically, if you bring a negative thought or emotion to any primary emotion, you create self-attack. If you bring a positive thought or emotion to it, you create a new quality (and category).

Accept anger, fear, sadness, love, joy, peace, playfulness, curiosity, etc. Reject (hate, fear) anger, fear, sadness, love, joy, peace, playfulness, curiosity, etc. Shame yourself for feeling sexual, playful, curious, anxious, loving, etc. Respect of persons when feeling angry, anxious, hate, etc. Wonder and curiosity to inferiority, confusion, embarrassment, etc.

Every second thought/emotion sets the frame for the first one, establishes the classification, and thereby establishes the quality of the emotion. If you fear your anger, your anger is now in the category of “fearful things.” If you meta-state your anger with calmness, you have calm anger. With respect, your anger is in the class of “respectful things.” In other words, you qualify your

emotion with the second emotion/thought. this reveals the importance of meta-stating.

The grand insight that arises from this is that if the quality of your emotions and your emotional life is less than you want it to be— spend some time meta-stating your emotions with the set of resourceful emotions that you want. For almost all of the negative emotions, if you meta-state them with calmness, thoughtfulness, acceptance, respect, curiosity, etc., you will significantly upgrade the quality of your life. Try it. One by one, take these highly resourceful states and apply them to your anger, fear, sadness, etc. It will transform your life!

In this meta-stating you are consciously using your self-reflexive consciousness to create a set of categories (or classes) that will now become established meta-frames in your Meta Place. Imagine that you do it with acceptance. Eventually, by repeating the acceptance state over and over, you will be establishing acceptance as your frame-of-mind. Do that with curiosity. Do that with respect. Do that with love, compassion, kindness, etc.

Now to do this, you do not need to learn any new process or technique. That’s because you have already been doing lots of meta-stating and you’ve been doing it all your life. Anytime you apply a thought or emotion to a previous thought or emotion, you are meta-stating. If you have come to fear your anger, lo and behold, that’s the meta-state structure you created. If you have shamed yourself for feeling sensual or sexual, that’s the meta-state you generated.

In fact, you cannot not meta-state yourself. The only question is how are you, and have you been, meta-stating yourself? More than likely, most of your life you have not even been aware of this happening. And most of your life, you have allowed others to meta-state your states. You felt anger or fear or sadness or something, and someone responded to you, “You shouldn’t feel that! Shame on you!” Or, “What’s wrong with you? Feeling that is disrespectful!” In that way, your family, friends, teachers, etc. have been inter-personally meta-stating you for years.

But now the jig is up. Since you can’t change what you’re not aware of, your awareness now gives you choice. Now you can see and detect their inter-personal meta-stating, and with awareness, you now have choice. You can accept it or not. You can question it and decide to meta-state yourself with a better choice.