How To Navigate Your Emotions

This week we continue with our Five Dimensions of Peace with the focus on our first dimension: Awareness

Over the coming months, we’ll be presenting numerous shows that feature an Alignment Movie or TV session around these Five Dimensions of Peace:

• Awareness
• Acceptance
• Respect
• Exchange
• Collaboration

As we mentioned last week, Peace is a big topic and there are numerous facets and patterns that get in the way of peace. Our intention with this series is to take you on a journey to understanding the depths of peace. Each Alignment Movie will fall into one of these five dimensions.

When we’re complete with this project, we will all have new insights of what is getting in the way of peace as individuals. And what is causing the macro problems that prevent us from coming together to build peace in our country and on our amazing planet.

Like all journeys – it’s one step at a time.

So lets take another step into the Awareness Dimensions with this week’s show called:

How To Navigate Your Emotions.

In 2013, we completed our book Taming Your Dragons: Making Peace with Your Emotions. It was our four year journey of understanding the power of the emotions and how they can help us navigate our lives.

In this week’s show we’ll feature some excerpts of the book we wrote together.

Emotions are typically divided into two categories: good and bad. We have this idea that emotions such as despondency, anger, grief, and fear are bad and should be avoided at all cost.

This is truly not the case.

They are seen as bad because they are often expressed in a destructive way. Each emotion is actually just a point on a scale that starts with the most negative emotion and ends with the most positive emotion you can think of.

In our book, Taming Your Dragons, we created an emotional continuum, or number line, to show how this works.

The rank and order of these emotions aren’t meant to be set in stone – they are simply used for discussion purposes. The rank and order will have variances based on each person’s individual emotional system and life patterns.

Each emotion has a purpose. Each one lets us know where we are on the continuum and what thoughts we have been listening to.

See this continuum as a number line starting with despondent (-6) on one end of the continuum and Joy and Love (+6) on the other. You can be at one, or you can be at minus one. What we usually consider to be negative emotions are just a reference point on the other end of the scale.

When you understand that there is nothing wrong with being at negative five, that it’s simply a reference point for where you are.   You can gauge which direction you are going and use that to change, then you don’t judge how you feel.

This is a key point. Because so many times we judge our emotions which results in an unwillingness to accept them. Usually we shut them down all together or find ways to avoid them often through various forms of addictions. These could be food and drink, shopping, sports, whatever is used to avoid what we’re really feeling.
When this happens, we’ve detached from our powerful guidance system.

To help us align with the power of our emotions and to better utilize them to guide us we have this week’s Alignment Movie:

The Giver

In the film, The Giver we’re introduced to what seems like a perfect community, without war, pain, suffering, differences or choice. At first it appears to be a utopian society but is revealed to be a dystopian one as the story progresses.

The Giver is directed by Phillip Noyce, starring Brenton Thwaites, Odeya Rush, Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Alexander Skarsgård, Katie Holmes, Cameron Monaghan and Taylor Swift. The film is based on the 1993 novel of the same name by Lois Lowry.

Following a calamity referred to as The Ruin, society is reorganized into a series of communities, and all memories of the past are held by one person, the Receiver of Memory. Since the Receiver of Memory is the only individual in the community who has the memories from before The Ruin, he must advise the Chief Elder, and the other Elders, on the decisions for the community.

On the day of graduation, everyone is assigned a career. Jonas is briefly skipped, as he has not been assigned a career. Instead, Jonas is to become the next Receiver of Memory, and progressively receive memories from the past receiver, The Giver (Jeff Bridges).

Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) is a 16-year-old boy who is anxious about the career he will be assigned (along with everyone else).

It’s a little freaky how they assign the careers in a massive stadium. As each gets their life assignment The Chief Elder, played by Meryl Steep says “Thank you for your childhood”.

It’s spooky and weird.

As you watch The Giver, look for these five key guideposts on how to navigate your emotions.