Emotional intelligence increases when you pay attention to your feelings and learn from them.
You might think you already pay attention to your feelings but you are more likely paying attention to the "story" of the feeling. In other words, you are paying attention to what you "think" not what you feel.
The story - who hurt you, how you got hurt, how you won't get hurt again, etc, is counterproductive to raising your emotional intelligence. read more Pay attention to the story and it will increase the discomfort of any feeling. To pay attention specifically to the feelings, you need to bring your awareness to your body, not the mind. I know you know this intellectually, but when you are caught in an uncomfortable feeling such as hurt, the first place you go to is your thinking. This is because the discomfort of the feeling is intolerable. Even positive feelings are intolerable when experienced within the body. This is because you are so conditioned to experience feelings from your intellect and not your body.
Imagine going to a Rolling Stones concert and just moving your head from side to side and not including your body in the experience. Hard to imagine, isn't it. It is just as hard to imagine that this is how we feel feelings - from our head, excluding information from our bodies.
If you stay in the intellect about feelings you become more intellectual not emotionally intelligent. If you stay in the sensation of a feeling that is in the body then you learn about yourself and your world in such a deep way that can only be compared to an ocean depth.
Staying with the sensation of a feeling is to drop right down into the energy of the feeling found in your body. Once you are in that energy you can do a few things. One, you can just stay with that energy and listen for what it has to tell you, or two, you can go down into the energy and experience it until it disappears, leaving you in the experience of Pure Consciousness, or three, you can go to the outside of the energy and experience Consciousness directly. Remember that the experience is as deep as the ocean so there are an infinite number of possibilities when experiencing the energy of a feeling.
It is only your conditioning from childhood and our culture that has you intellectualizing feelings. When you really feel your feelings from within the body, you gain access into innate intelligence and wisdom.
If you want to read more about how to get to the energy of a feeling and increase emotional intelligence, you should read any of following:
Power of Now, EcKhart Tolle
Pure Awareness, Tom Stone
The Mind Whisper, Marty Murphy
Click here for more information about coaching packages. If you are interested in a complementary coaching session call 530-320-2120 or click here to contact me.
