Emotions, Feelings and Actions

[ashvini]

Anyone knows of techniques/meditations/tools that help to enhance the emotional awareness of a person ?

90% of the time, I am only dimly aware of my emotions. I would like to be able to 'stay awake' more often. Specially when a bout of anger or jealousy or greed or lust is about to hit me.

What happens most times is that we become 'un-aware' and un-conscious just at the onset of these emotions.

Wise people say - actions follow feelings which follow emotions.
so emotional awareness is at the root of a highly conscious being.
And I want to get there.

anyone got ideas ?

av

[Dolazy]

Awareness meditation is the most important tool for this, but requires some discipline.

Sometimes it's easier to flush your emotions and thoughts in a journal.

It's interesting to also record how exactly the emotion was created. I once read about the OPET model. It stands for the order how emotions and thoughts arise. It's Observation -> Pattern matching -> Emotion -> Thought. So you could record what you observed, what it made you think of and what were the resulting emotions and thoughts. Separating these helps in distantiating yourself from the emotion so that you feel more in control.

[Dolazy]

Originally Posted by ashvini

Wise people say - actions follow feelings which follow emotions.
so emotional awareness is at the root of a highly conscious being.
And I want to get there.

Actually the Abraham Hicks teachings say that emotions are secondary to thought. Emotions are an indicator of the 'quality' of our thoughts. The freedom to choose our thoughts gives us the power to change our emotions, and therefore also our actions. You could check out some of their processes on how to choose better feeling thoughts. They are really good!