Recognizing Emotions and Feelings

Morgan said...

I have given this some thought. I think I understand what you say about negative emotions that keep us from finding any happiness. But I don't quite get what you think about the difference between emotion and feeling. Please explain. Thanks.

Thanks for the thoughtful question, Morgan. I think the words feeling and emotion are often used interchangeably, but I am convinced that there is a distinct and profound difference. Gregg Braden tells us that prayer consists of thoughts, coming from the crown, brow and throat chakras - and feelings coming from the base, sacral and solar plexus chakras - into the heart. I think that this feeling that moves through us is the energy that moves through the matrix of our being that we can FEEL. By remembering the feeling, we can move energy through our system. If we are feeling low, we can imagine feeling joy, and our energy will rise to the feeling of joy. By understanding our feelings like this, we learn to command our energies and can heal our bodies and raise our consciousness.

Emotions, on the other hand, are like feelings because we feel them too. But they are responses of our emotional body to events in our experience. If we lack emotional body maturity, our emotions can be based on patterns of previous experience. We feel fear when our hand is near fire because our hand has been burned before. When we are young, our emotions occur naturally, like the physical body functions of breathing and digesting. As our emotional body matures, we understand that the emotions that occur naturally can be changed by the way we formulate our responses or even our perceptions. We can choose to feel caution instead of fear. We can perceive fire as a thing of beauty instead of danger, because we have learned to respond appropriately.

In my first novel, Remember Me, Mary Margaret comes close to understanding the nature of her emotions and feelings, but in the end, is overwhelmed with loss and grief. In my second novel, Chasing Twilight, Molly has the emotional body maturity to not only pace her emotions, but utilize her feelings for healing and consciousness raising. This character will go on to explore the possibilities that feelings allow in the third novel.

Thanks again for this great question, Morgan.

Fulfilling the prayer for love

Catherine said...
I will read that part of the book over again, but it sounds like you are talking about getting in touch with an archtype of love, by creating a prayer for love. I wonder if connecting like this with ourselves doesn't "attract" others with those qualities into our lives. Just thinking out loud...

Catherine,

Your comment encompasses so much more than a section of my book, I thought I would begin another post. By thinking out loud, you bring up the concept of how we create our lives. I have more of a “feeling” for this than a theory that I can articulate. So much has been written about this, including portions of the bible. I am currently reading Thomas Troward, 19th Century mystic, who does a pretty good job of giving us an outline of the process as he sees it, without becoming terribly “religious.”

He begins with the concept of Alpha and Omega – the entire series of causation from the first originating movement to the final and completed result. Everything has its origin in an idea, a thought, and it has its completion in the manifestation of that thought in form. Many intermediate stages are necessary, but the Alpha and Omega of the series are the thought and the thing. This shows us that in essence the thing already existed in the thought. Omega is already potential in Alpha.

Like Greg Braden, Troward thinks that it takes thought and feeling to create prayer. He says thought creates form but it is feeling that gives vitality to thought. “It is this indissoluble union of Thought and Feeling that distinguishes creative thought from merely analytical thought and places it in a different category… it is that entering into the Mind of the Spirit.”

This leads us to the idea of the prayer including archetypes: “Now the images in the Mind of the Spirit must necessarily be GENERIC. The reason for this is that by its very nature the Principle of Life must be prolific, that is, tending to Multiplicity, and therefore the original Thought-image must be fundamental to whole races, just what Plato meant by archetypal ideas. This is the perfect subsistence of the thing in the thought.”

Troward on the relation of the prayer to the manifestation: “This specialization can only take place through the individual himself, it logically follows that the Life, which he thus specializes, become his own life. This self recognition through the individual cannot in any way change the inherent nature of the Creative Sprit, and therefore to the extent to which the individual perceives its identification with himself, he places himself under its guidance, and so he becomes one of those who are 'led by Spirit'. Thus he begins to find the alpha and omega of the Divine ideal reproduced in himself, in a very small degree at present, but containing the principle of perpetual growth into an infinite expansion of which we can as yet form no conception.”

There is so much trendy information today about the Law of Attraction and how it can get us what we want in life. I think much of this info misses the point that Troward hits right here, and that is, that the will that makes manifest is Divine Will. Our self will must be in agreement. Unless our prayers connect with the archetypical ideas, and our egos detach from the “things” coming into manifestation, how can our prayers be fulfilled? This is the crux of “Thy will be done.” We direct our thoughts and feelings to the universal, or archetypical, place ourselves in the flow of infinite expansion, and have faith that what will come from it, will be just what we need, to allow us to be led by spirit on our beautiful journey.

Thanks for the conversation. Molly Brogan

Discussion of Gregg Braden's Seven Mirrors and divine will

Ken said...
I like Gregg Braden's formula that thought and feeling creates prayer (not reality.) Your idea doesn't seem to leave room for God's will.

Hi Ken,

I liked your post so much. I thought it could stand alone as a new discussion. You're right, of course. Divine Will is the integral aspect to our human experience. Most religions recognize a power greater than us. Consider, for a moment, the God in us as the source of all creation. Then we would create our reality not by what we DO, but by what we recognize, respect or allow as divine will moves through us. Divine will is the God in us in motion.

If we can position ourselves to live life like this, another of Gregg Braden's presentations comes into play: The Seven Mirrors in the Essene Mystery of Relationship. These mirrors are:

1)who we are in the moment;

2)What we judge in the moment;

3)what has been lost, given away or taken away;

4)our most forgotten love;

5)our relationship with God;

6)our dark night of the soul;

7)our perfection.

According to this belief, our experience becomes a vibrational mirror that reflects one or some combination of mirrored patterns in others. Recognizing the wisdom of the mirror accelerates our evolution of emotion and understanding. God speaks to us and guides us through the universal law of vibration and our experience unfolds according to divine will.

Many thanks for your post. Molly Brogan