Emotional Intelligence and Spirituality

            Years ago, I had a friend who bought into the idea that men are rational and women are emotional. I laughed and asked her if she ever watched a football game where most of the spectators are men. What did she think the excitement, cheering, high-fiving, booing, and despair were if not displays of emotions? It seemed her definition of emotional came down to “cries easily”.

What about wars, are they ever rational? We’ve been in a patriarchy for ten thousand years, men have overwhelmingly been responsible for wars. Some bully, who has absorbed his tribe or nation into his identity, has gotten his feelings hurt and now he feels he must display his superiority over another man/nation in the guise of doing it for his people. It might seem like war is about territory or resources, but those are things that could be rationally negotiated if emotions didn’t get in the way.

Humans are emotional, period. The only question is, who has more emotional intelligence, which is the ability to recognize, understand, manage, and use one’s emotions for their benefit and the benefit of others. Historically, women have displayed higher emotional intelligence because they were allowed to be emotional. This has made women strong. Men have been fed the lie that they are rational and do not need to develop emotional intelligence, which is how they end up weak and destructive and only able to perform strength.

When clients discuss difficulties in their lives, they often do not realize what they find difficult is not the situation but their emotions. For example, the act of discussion is not difficult. What makes it difficult are the emotions around the discussion. The physical act of telling an employee they need to do their job or they will get fired is not difficult, but feelings of inadequacy or empathizing with the employee make it hard for the manager. It is not hard to open one’s mouth and say, “I want to break up”, but emotions of grief and guilt and fear are uncomfortable.

Feelings. Nothing more than feelings.

When after The Break I wrote about how difficult it was in this mind, I made sure to make it clear it was not truth that made it difficult, it was ego. Emotions are not ego; they are just part of being human. But ego uses emotions and judges them, usually negatively. Inadequacy, anxiety, guilt, fear—ego uses these to foster judgments but judges these feelings as well, often at the same time. You should be anxious, because fear is real, but it also makes you weak. You should feel guilty, but you’re a child of God so it’s wrong to feel guilty. You can’t win with ego.

To ego, emotions are an embarrassing nuisance, too human for its values. Oh, how ego hates humanity, its chosen but inadequate reality. The body is weak, it sickens and dies. And emotions expose ego’s true nature. Ah, but emotions do have value somewhere for ego: Manipulating others.

Liz here began life uncomfortable with her feelings. She felt things strongly, it seemed more than others, and this embarrassed her. She’s probably on the sensitivity scale somewhere, along with 20% of the population. Her mother was emotional and her father was decidedly unemotional. She took him as a model despite identifying with her mother. But time and wisdom broke this down and she came to realize emotions were always expressed and the only question was if they would be expressed inappropriately or in a healthy manner. The more she allowed herself to feel, the less afraid she was of her feelings.

Overwhelm is what most people seem to fear about their feelings. They fear their emotions will be more than they can handle and break them somehow. But they don’t. Or, in the rare cases when they do, the person heals and comes back stronger.

Emotions turn out to be an essential part of honest spiritual expression. Because unacknowledged feelings are a lack of self-awareness and a lack of self-awareness gets in the way of spiritual awareness. Spiritual truth can’t get past a belief in inherent guilt. And belief in inherent guilt is not just an idea, it’s a living experience, just as spirituality must be to have any value.

So many students of A Course in Miracles that I encounter want to reach a point of feeling only “good” feelings. But if your measure of the value of spirituality is how you feel,  you will never find a perfect teaching. As long as the human is here in your awareness, you will feel all the human things. Oh, yes, it changes. Feelings are less strong and pass more quickly. But they occur, both “good” and “bad”. You come to see that they are nothing. But they occur.

The measure of your spiritual advancement should be your awareness of truth.  But this won’t be valuable enough for ego. It wants no “bad” feelings because “bad” feelings remind it of what it has made. The awareness of truth leads to what could be called a “good” feeling, but behind, around, and beside the human experience playing out. It is perfect, whole, constant and still, but your overall experience will remain mixed while the person still appears in your awareness.

To be healthy, spiritually and otherwise, it is essential to recognize your emotions, to give yourself space to feel them fully, then to let them pass. They cannot destroy you. Emotions are just the human experience and it all passes.

 

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If you have a question the answer to which you feel may be helpful to others, send it to Liz@acimmentor.com and indicate that you want it answered in this newsletter/blog.