META TEXTURING

“How can you manage your emotions with Meta-States?” That’s what a person in Romania asked me this past week. Another person asked, “Can you do anything about negative emotions with the Meta-States Model?” The short answer: Yes, definitely! If you want to know how, here’s how.

After you make an emotional response to some event, person, or word and you are in an emotional state, then what you think-feel next will govern the very quality of your emotions and emotional state. Imagine that you are feeling fearful and afraid of something, that you are in a state of fear. What do you think or feel about that experience?

If you are ashamed of it, then you have shameful fear. If you are angry at it, then you have angered or resentful fear. If you are accepting, then with that acceptance you probably have a calm and thoughtful fear.

As the second thought-feeling sets an interpretative frame for the first, it thereby textures the first. And with that, you now know how to bring resourceful thoughts and feelings to your emotions to raise the quality of your emotional states. Now, isn’t that powerful?

Take anger. What is the quality of your anger? How have you textured it? Do you have respectful or disrespectful anger? Do you have calm or stressful anger? Do you have rough or kind anger? The modifying word (“compassion”) before the emotional term (“anger”) describes a meta-state, e.g., compassionate anger. When I used to run “Anger Control” workshops, my goal was to enable each person to develop a very rich and resourceful anger state. What if you developed a calm, respectful, thoughtful, and compassionate anger state? Now that would be a different animal!

To texture a state is to bring a resourceful thought, feeling, belief, memory, imagination, decision, etc. to the state you want to qualify. In meta-stating, you set up the mental and neurological connection so that your second state is about the first state. Making this meta-move enables the second state (the meta-state) to govern the first. And because things do not stay meta in the human experience (June 7, When Meta Dives, Neurons #32), that resource penetrates into the primary state and textures it. In Neuro-Semantics, we call this coalescing. The higher state coalesces into the previous state.

Now we can ask, “What meta resources do you have fully embodied into your primary state?” Actually, this is the design of the Accessing Personal Genius program. We go through a list of requirements or prerequisites of “genius”— the component elements that characterize someone in an optimal “in the zone” state. We take a sense of personal empowerment, proactivity, and

responsibility (the Power Zone pattern) and texture it into your optimal state. We take the states of self-acceptance, self-appreciation, and self-esteem and texture (Meta-Stating Self pattern) it into the optimal state. In APG, we spend three days doing this with 14 patterns and in the process, we meta-state your best state 21 times. That is a lot of meta-texturing.

Meta-texturing is the technique by which you can texture or qualify your emotional states so that you can have high quality emotions. Doing that also puts you in charge so that you have your emotions rather than your emotions having you. This is the process that we use for emotional intelligence— emotional awareness and management.

What is the quality of your emotions? Do they reflect your best resources, values, and intentions? If not, then the answer lies in meta-texturing.

For more— check out Secrets of Personal Mastery, Meta-States, Winning the Inner Game, The Crucible, Unleashed.