Emotions Trump Thoughts

A lot of people talk all the time about how your thoughts control your emotions, and... sure... There is certainly truth to that. If you're constantly telling yourself that you're no good, that life sucks, that you don't deserve love, that things will never get better, or if you're never practicing positive, grateful thinking, then yes... you'll feel more hopeless and lost and will be more prone to being in low energy emotions and in bad moods.

But not enough people talk about - or even recognize - how much more powerful your emotions are at creating your thoughts.

Do you not notice that when you happen to be in a good mood you have more positive, optimistic thoughts? You're more prone to seeing the good in things or believing somehow that things will work out even when - perhaps even a moment ago - you were so sure that everything was going wrong?

Don't you sometimes have more faith in the outcome of your endeavors when you happen to be feeling good? Even when, maybe that mood was caused by some sort of intoxication?

Or how about when you sometimes go to bed feeling good and everything is alright, but you wake in the morning with some anxiety or just in a bad mood for no reason and all of a sudden all of the reasons you thought things were going well seem so much less plausible?

Yes... your emotions are FAR more powerful at manipulating your thoughts than the other way around. And you all know this pretty intuitively, because you know that when you're depressed or in a shitty place emotionally, just thinking positively doesn't have the power to change that.

There is a constant subconscious cycle going on between your thoughts, your emotions and your sensations, and this unrealized, unconscious cycle is at the root of how I help my students learn true emotional mastery.

Every moment of every day, this cycle is taking place, and it goes in both directions. Your thoughts manipulate your emotions, your emotions manifest in some way in your body (say, you tense up your shoulders, you clench your jaw, or you feel some tension in your body like the butterflies in your stomach). And simultaneously, the cycle works the other way around.

The key to true change and healing is to start taking control of this cycle. To start recognizing and dealing with your thoughts as their own independent experience, so that your negative thoughts don't convince you that there is something truly wrong and so it doesn't need to create more negative emotions and more bodily reactions. To be able to experience your emotions as their own thing, so that a moment of feeling down doesn't move you into a negative thought spiral and put your body into a tense state of fight or flight.

And to be able to feel the energetic/physical uncomfortable sensations of your body without having that move you into a negative emotional space or negative thought cycles.

These are the 3 elements of your experience of reality: Thoughts. Emotions. Sensations.

And while there is a link between them such that they constantly manipulate one another, they are in fact 3 separate things.

When you can isolate each one and know how to handle each one directly so as to prevent this negative, downwards spiral, you can start taking control of this cycle and actively create a positive spiral whereby your negative thoughts, emotions and sensations don't bleed out into one another, and you can encourage the positive ones to move you into a positive cycle.

By mastering this process, you can learn to turn every negative experience into a healing moment, and learn to make the most out of the positive ones, and this will put you onto a positive spiral where you can keep on getting better, stronger, and more free of all of the negative programming that keeps dragging you down.

This is at the core of my 'Feelings First' approach to emotional healing.