Changing how you feel- quick, easy and fun ways to get to know your inner mind and take control of it

I was writing a follow up email to a client after his second session with me. They all get homework 🙂 It helps to cement the changes we’re making whilst also increasing their emotional intelligence and self awareness.

And while I was in the middle of this email, I realised this would be fun to share to you, a simple, fast, effective and FUN way to change your feelings fairly instantaneously.

I was going to do an audio because that’s the quickest, easier way to share this and I’ll probably add that down below with some extra info on your Control Room. Da-Da-Da! Yep, a big reveal, you have a control room for your emotions, feelings, sensations etc and you are probably walking around totally unaware of this place of power that belongs to you!

Not only are you unaware, you actually think you are at the mercy of your feelings and emotions. Your control room has been hijacked and they are running you!

Time to take back control and get all of you working the way you want it all to, every part of you looking forward in the same direction, striving for the same goals. Doesn’t that sound good?

So, close you eyes for a minute and picture your control room. You now see why I think an audio to describe the process would be better for you, because you can’t close your eyes and read my words at the same time.

But I’ve started, so I’ll finish. Read this first, then do it and then when I get the audio put up, you can come back and do it again, and again and again, because this is yours, baby and you get to decide how you feel once you know how.

Okay, let’s take a moment. Make sure you’re sitting comfortably and will have a few minutes of uninterrupted time and space for yourself. Take three slow deep breaths. All the way in, and all the way out, in for a count of six and out for the count of six. 3 times. And gently close your eyes.

Now picture yourself standing in your control room, I don’t know what yours is like but if you haven’t ever been in here, its probably looking a bit neglected and could do with a good clean out, so have a brush, a duster and a can of WD-40 to hand.

Your control room could be all high tech and fancy like the bridge of a spaceship with a dazzling array of lights and switches and buttons and knobs, it may be like the power plant that Homer works at in The Simpsons or it could be really old school with wheels you move by hand, levers you have to pull and push to move and dials that need a lot of elbow grease.

Doesn’t matter what it looks like, yours is unique to you, so go with it. If you want to change it, I suggest you do that at a later stage. Today is for getting to know where everything is, how it works, getting familiar with it all and your position as boss, captain, leader, queen of it all.

Coming up to Christmas, a lot of people find themselves feeling harried and stressed, so look around for your stress dial and once you’ve found it see what level it says you’re at from 0 through to 10. 10 being ‘Arrgh, I’m going to run screaming around the garden pulling out my hair if someone else suggest a f8cking theme for Christmas!’

So, you’re got your level, let’s say it’s at 8, what I want you to do now is reach out and turn it down. Now you can do all this in your head but it becomes way more effective when you get involved with your physical body and actually reach out your arms to turn that dial now. Reach out, with both hands if necessary, and if you need to, squirt some WD-40 on that f*cker to get it moving.

Turn it down, all the way down to 2. And you will feel an instant shift.

If you don’t, you didn’t do it. Read through the instructions again and allow yourself to go with it. Don’t think you’ll look silly, sometimes it just doesn’t matter. Here, the end justifies the means, no-one dies. You’re simply sitting with your eyes closed, arms stretched out in front of you, twiddling an imaginary dial. What’s silly about that?

Once you get your stress down to a more manageable, sane level, you can start looking around at all the other buttons and dials in your control room. There’s probably some covered in cobwebs because they deal with emotions and feelings you’ve never acknowledged or experienced.

That’s the next part of this training today: Recognising what your feeling.

Explore your emotional state more amd more and get familiar with your inner landscape. The more words we use to describe our emotions, the more emotional states we feel. Unfortunately in modern life, we have almost reduced our feelings to sad, angry, bad and happy.

There’s a wonderful array of feelings to be experienced; some very nuanced like peeved vs annoyed vs irritated to the joyous emotion of cheerfulness which is very different to happy which is again very different to contentedness.

There are a number of links below to a variety of tools to give you emotion names and guide you in learning your inner landscape. You can play with this too using your control room. Close your eyes, get in there and find the levers and dials and gauges for various emotions you want to feel more/less of and turn that dial up or down and see how expert you get at changing your state. This is your mind, your emotions and feelings, your inner landscape. Get to know it as well as you know your physical body.

Your feelings are your feelings, and if you feel something whether anyone else tells you its true or not, the feeling is real, the feeling is true. You may be reacting to a false interpretation or misunderstanding but how you feel cannot be argued with.

However you can and should start questioning these feelings, any feeling in fact. Where do they come from? What purpose do they serve, what point are they trying to make? Are they helping you? In which particular circumstances do they arise? Are the same people always around you or in communication with you when you start to feel a certain way? Where does the feeling arise in your body? Does it travel around or stay still? Map its journey, its shape and colour, observe it.

Then name the feeling, be as precise as you can be, Attached is an emotion wheel and a list of emotions. Get used to observing, analysing and then identifying your emotions. This puts you in control of them. Go into your control room and find the button, dial, lever that deals with each of your emotions and feelings and play with turning them up and down.

Be an observer and you will become aware that you are not your feelings. You feel them, they are a part of you but they aren’t you. Just as your thoughts are not who you are. You think them, you are not them. Same with what you say and do, you are not the words you use or the actions you make. You are the consciousness that creates your thoughts, feelings, emotions and so on, they are not who you are.

When you become aware that these things are not you, you have power over them, you regain control. You can choose to relinquish control and be swept up by your feelings or you can choose to observe, see them happening, feel them and stay in your power. Emotions rise and fall like the waves on the ocean. Allow them to rise up, and they will ebb away. Try to stop them, stuff them down, deny them and they will keep coming back.

Accept it, allow it, feel it. And let it go.

This takes practice, meditation will help. And even people who have been meditating for decades can forget and get swept up into drama and upset. People who know about their control room often forget it’s there when caught in a moment of emotional madness.

Start practicing by identifying how you feel, say ‘I notice the feeling of…..’ Notice where it starts in your body, all the circumstances around it, and as you do you step outside of the feeling and become the observer.

There is no failure, do not judge yourself, there is only experience and you gain more experience every time you become aware of how you feel.

The whole thing is simply a practice, all of life is just a practice.

I hope this helps,

Cynthia xx

http://blog.thejuntoinstitute.com/the-junto-emotion-wheel-why-and-how-we-use-it

https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/emotion-wheel/

https://wire.wisc.edu/quizzesnmore/emotionwords.aspx