What Are Our Emotions Trying To Tell Us?

I’ve been bonding with my beautiful black girlfriend, Tommy. Tommy Emmanuel Limited Edition Maton has been a close companion of mine for around 24 years. We’ve shared many tears, songs, longings and laughter together.

I thank my stars that I grew up with a musical family. My mum played piano and guitar and sang. My dad played the piano accordion and the mouth organ, my older brother played guitar and sang and my older sister played piano and sang in a choir. I played piano and flute, and I still love to sing and play the guitar.

Making Music is a Great Way to Get in Touch with a Vital Part of You.. The Part that can Feel

I’ve been exploring feelings and emotions to a greater depth, of late, and I’m developing skills to become more emotionally literate. Until I started learning ‘how I feel’, I didnt realise how emotionally illiterate I was. I’d say, for example “I feel pissed off” but when I explored it further it was often more like “I feel diminished, irritated, upset, sad, empty”.

Knowing How You Feel Gives You the Steering Wheel of Life’s Emotional Roller Coaster

When we are triggered and uncomfortable emotions arise, if we can label the emotions articulately, it equips us with the ability to learn the language of emotion. To know the language of emotion is to understand what our emotions, as messengers, are trying to communicate to us.

It’s not uncommon to bundle unwanted feelings up into a big box and suppress them. The crux of the problem is, however, they don’t go away, but instead operate a background subconscious function where you may for example have a tendency to explode, unrealistically, or you don’t have a clue where your personal or moral boundaries are.

Why are boundaries necessary? Without clear defining boundaries people tend to become people pleasing push overs that inevitably attract the kind of people that gladly take advantage. Knowing how we feel helps us to navigate where to place our boundaries and how we know when someone has crossed them.

Communicating Healthy Boundaries Keeps Relationships Solid

Through honest self discovery and having a good moral set of boundaries, we automatically create an environment where we manifest mutually fulfilling, honest, authentic relationships.

Self mastery and getting to know ourselves wholly, as a human being, as a soul, as our essence, is the key. No judgement, just discovery. What could be greater than to master your Self? And the guitar.

Oh, let me share my definition of ‘mastery’; To master something is not to control it, it’s to know it, intimately.

Emotional Mastery Exercise

Take a gentle breath in, through your nose, and as you breath out slowly, through your nose, ask yourself, as you pause after the outbreath “how do I feel right now”? Check in on your feeling state and name how you feel in as many descriptive words as possible. Take your time. Write your words down. Repeat the exercise often.

May the force be with you on the journey of emotional mastery 🌟

Gracias!

Sonja 🌈

Following is a video by Richard Grannon who gives great practical, up to date advice and thorough explanations (and courses) on emotional literacy and emotional flashbacks. I have personally benefitted from practicing his emotional literacy techniques and reparenting methods.

More information about Richard Grannon can be found at spartanlifecoach.com

BLOG Author

Little Wings author, illustrator and designer, Sonja Kallio, shares motivational exercises and techniques for individual inner self discovery. Blog writings cover a variety of tips that assist in self inquiry to find where, in ones life, it can be brighter and better.