Sweet Emotions: Stay Alive and Thrive

Last night I fully intended to write and publish the last in my series of articles answering questions about the Master Cleanse.  I enthusiastically downloaded great content into my head and typed it into my document but felt that another topic wanted to come through.  I am under the influence of Steve Pavlina’s experiment on subjective reality so that may be playing a role in what I write about and how I approach a topic.  A number of synchronicities pulled me in the direction of talking about emotions.  I feel like the simple concept I am going to discuss in this article will open up a new world for some people.  I received confirmation within a complex set of dreams that included big thumping hearts on a shelf beating strongly.  I also feel that I am not meant to delve into this topic by filling in the intellectual blanks and providing the illustrative examples myself like I did with my article on showing leadership by accepting other people’s choices.

I feel that I need to keep this message very simple.  There is so much I could say about emotions such as your emotions are not facts.  Here is the message though.  There is a difference between your basic emotions and your higher cognitive emotions.

Basic versus Higher Cognitive Emotions*

Our basic emotions are built in—they are innate.  They are not learned.  They include emotions such as joy, distress, fear, surprise, anger, and disgust.  People from all cultures experience these emotions.  They come from the core of our being.  You felt these emotions before you had the cognitive ability to describe what they are.

Our higher cognitive emotions are those in which you need to have a relationship to someone else in order to experience them. In other words you are experiencing the emotion relative to other people.  Examples of higher cognitive emotions include love, pride, embarrassment, shame, guilt, jealousy, and envy.  These emotions are ones that you experience as a reaction to an interaction you have with someone else or the thought of someone else.  The other person does not need to be present for you to experience these emotions, but you must think of their existence as real in order to evoke these emotions within yourself.

Sweet Emotions: Stay Alive and Thrive

The basic emotions help us stay alive.  They are signals to us about what is happening in our environment that helps or hurts us in taking care of our basic needs.  The higher cognitive emotions are the ones that drive us in the direction of perpetual development and self-improvement.  The social context in which we live provides us with the yard sticks in which we measure our success.  These emotions are not bad or shallow or less valid than the basic emotions–they are just different types of sign posts.

It is useful to have an awareness of the difference between these types of emotions because we can easily confuse the purpose of our cognitive emotions for the function that is played by our basic emotions.   We act as if the object of our love and shame are a direct requirement or threat to our very existence.

In another synchronicity last night, I was cruising through Steve Pavlina’s forums and found a reference from Jack to the work of David Deida.   I had been exposed to these concepts very recently.  I went to Jack’s website and found an article which does a beautiful job illustrating peeling off the different layers of emotions to get to what makes us feel joy at a very basic level.  I would suggest that you read his article and then re-read this one and see what you notice in your life!

Physical exercise that gets your heart pounding is also very good for you.  Give yourself the gift of an endorphin rush today!

*The content covering Basics versus Higher Cognitive Emotions was largely taken from the book How to Mend Your Broken Heart: Overcome Emotional Pain at the End of a Relationship, by Paul McKenna, Ph.D. and Hugh Willbourn, Ph.D.