RIDING THE WAVES OF AN EMOTION

The original etymology of emotion is actually very telling. What’s most obvious in the term is the idea of motion, something is moving. And when something is moving, it is moving out and away from something and simultaneously it is moving toward something. Accordingly, the word “emotion” once upon a time, coming from Latin, was spelled “ex-motion” and indicated even more clearly, a moving out of the energy within the living system.

When you feel an emotion, you feel that something is moving out of you and going somewhere. But where is that energy going? It is a push from the rare, but not only that. It is also a pointing toward something. It is an impetus that forms and creates something. In this, emotions point to the future and to the inter-personal field, that is, to relationships.

When you are angry, you usually feel that someone has violated some value that’s important to you and your energy goes out to try to make corrections. When you are afraid, you feel that someone or something is threatening and dangerous, and so your energy goes out to move you out of harm’s way.

This is the case with every emotion. It offers you energy and a direction for that energy. It’s a myth and falsehood that emotions go round and round in circles, either clockwise or counter- clockwise. You can impose that idea on them, but that is not how they function. You can forcibly impose the idea that emotions spin round and round as some are contending in NLP. At best that’s a hypnotic induction and as far as I can tell, it won’t take you anywhere useful.

Now in speaking about emotions, I’m speaking about a complex combination of feeling and thought. We call the “feeling” part sensations or kinesthetics and they can be internal and/or external sensations. A sensation by itself is not an emotion. To have an emotion, you also have to have some cognitive thought, memory, or meaning.

That’s why when you have emotions (or emote) you are communicating with the significant people in your life. You are communicating about what’s going on inside of you and you are communicating as a way to reach out to shape your way of relating to others.

In this way emotions combine the past and the future. The past is in your emotions because you learned them in your past; you learned them from previous events and experiences where you thought, reasoned, drew conclusions, and created meanings. With that background, they are now informing your current situation and bringing forth the emotions that you have developed. But there’s a problem The problem is that what happened in the past, especially during childhood, is typically no longer relevant in adult life.

Then to complicate matters, a second problem is that you often seek to understand why you feel as you do by reasoning that “the past caused it.” But that’s fallacious reasoning. The “past” did

not cause anything. Instead, it was the source and context in which you learned something that’s still present. Yet what was meaningful in your past may not be meaningful any longer.

Your emotions also relate to the future. That’s because emotions are intentional. With any emotion, you are intending to do something. The question is what? “What are you attempting to do in feeling and expressing a given emotion?” We now ask a different question from “why am I feeling X?” Now we ask, “What is this emotion for? What is it seeking to do?”

Emotions energize us to move forward to achieve goals, ideals, and possibilities of our future. Now imagination goes to work and you end up creating possibilities which you then try on emotionally as you experiment with it. It activates you with the energy to do something. Here the purposes of your emotions sends you forward into the future to possibilities and to new choices for your life. Here reasons would send you backwards to the past trying to explain the source of where you learned how to generate the emotion originally.

One way to think about your emotions is to imagine them as waves—waves moving you out from where you are to somewhere that you could be that would actualize the meaning that created the emotion. If the emotion is healthy and appropriate, then you can ride it on out actualizing your highest values into your best performances. This is the true usefulness of emotions—energizing and empowering you to make your inside world of your beliefs, intentions, understandings, etc. real in the outside world.