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    Tag: 2011

    A Holiday Parable (#797)

    Once upon a time, or so the story goes, the people lived on a desert world which existed inside of a giant, pitch black room...
    Michael Neill December 26, 2011

    Blowing Up Your Life (#796)

    Over the past week, my business manager and I talked and thought and dreamed (and drank a lot of caffeinated beverages) with one purpose in mind - to …
    Michael Neill December 19, 2011

    A Most Unusual Job (#795)

    I was recently trying to explain to somebody what transformative coaching "really" is, when they asked me to share some examples of problems or situat…
    Michael Neill December 12, 2011

    Leveraging the Human Experience, part two (#793)

    To briefly recap, the three most common intervention points in the "human system" are results, behaviors, thoughts (including but not limited to belie…
    Michael Neill November 28, 2011

    Leveraging the Human Experience, part one (#792)

    In systems thinking, there's a concept known as "leverage points". A leverage point is the place in the system where the smallest force will create t…
    Michael Neill November 21, 2011

    A Transformative Conversation (#791)

    One of the things I am asked to do on a fairly regular basis is to explain how specifically I coach people, whether on the radio or through my one yea…
    Michael Neill November 14, 2011

    Natural Eating (#790)

    About seven years ago, I was privileged enough to work with my friend Paul McKenna on a book that transformed the publishing and weight-loss industrie…
    Michael Neill November 7, 2011

    A Multidimensional Experience (#789)

    In the opening chapter of Supercoach, I describe the difference between the horizontal and vertical dimensions of coaching as follows: Traditional coa…
    Michael Neill October 31, 2011

    Beyond Reframing (#788)

    "Reframing" is the art of shifting perspectives, and is considered a core skill in pretty much any field that involves directing people's perceptions,…
    Michael Neill October 24, 2011

    The Sine Curve of Emotion and the World of Deeper Feeling (#787)

    Last night the family went to see my youngest daughter shine in a magnificent (obviously) musical performance...
    Michael Neill October 17, 2011
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    The Sine Curve of Emotion and the World of Deeper Feeling (#787)

    Forum Description

    Last night the family went to see my youngest daughter shine in a magnificent (obviously) musical performance. This morning she came into the kitchen with a sad face on and said "When you're in a show and it ends, it's really sad." Before I even had the chance to comment, her face brightened as she said "Are we still going to the pumpkin patch today?" and began making the case for our getting the largest pumpkin in Neill family history. About an hour later, when my wife joined us for coffee and hot cocoa, the journey from happy to sad to happy was repeated in roughly the same sequence. I call this phenomenon the "sine curve of emotion", as the rise and fall or our moods and emotions tend to go up and down with the consistency and predictability of a mathematical equation. Of course, whereas a traditional sine curve looks something like this:
    Graph
    our emotional sine curve tends to look a bit more like this:
    Graph
    As a culture, we have a tendency to become as obsessive about explaining and tracking these highs and lows as market traders and investors are with tracking the stock market. And as with the markets, we continue to hope against hope that if only we can discover and master some secret magic formula, we will be able to prop the sine curve up at the top so that we can sustain longer and longer highs and avoid those nasty lows. There are a couple of different ways we attempt to do this. The first is to try and master the art of positive thinking. Because at some level we recognize that our emotions follow our thoughts, we try to control our thoughts to master our emotions. The problem with this strategy is that thought doesn't seem to lend itself to control over time, and nearly everybody experiences a backlash from this "fake it 'til you make it" ind of approach. The resultant artificially altered curve tends to wind up looking something like this:
    Graph
    We are able to maintain a positive emotional state for an extended period of time, but like an olympic power lifter attempting to set a new world record, when our attention flags for even a second the whole thing comes crashing down to the ground with a bang.
    Weight Lifter
    The second way we try to avoid the ups and downs of the emotional sine curve is to completely deaden ourselves to our emotions, attempting to stay at a comfortable "5" on a scale from 1 to 10. For a time, this detached apathy can be a relief from the crazy up and down ride of the sine curve, and we can easily confuse it with peace of mind.  The difference is, peace of mind actually feels good - the apathy of detachment doesn't feel like much of anything.  
    Graph
    Fortunately, there is some good news coming - a pot of gold hidden underneath this emotional rainbow. For at all times, independent from circumstances or even the roller coaster of thought and emotion, there is a world of deeper feeling available to us. While we sometimes give these feelings emotional labels, like gratitude, humility, awe, peace, joy, and bliss, what sets them apart is their unconditionality - their consistent presence through time, regardless of how things are going in our lives. They are the constant backdrop against which our emotional life unfolds - the space out of which our thoughts and emotions arise and back into which they dissolve. For me, it seems this world of deeper feeling is a part of our birthright - the simple feeling of being and aliveness we were born with, uncontaminated by the wild imaginings of our personal thinking. And the moment my thoughts settle, regardless of where I happen to be on the emotional sine curve, these deeper feelings rise up closer and closer to the surface until they break through into my consciousness. I often think of these deeper feelings in terms of water - a river that flows with peace and well-being; a well of being which we can always dip into and never runs dry; an ocean of consciousness that surrounds me at all times.  
    Graph
    As I live with a deeper awareness of this world of deeper feeling, the ups and downs of the emotional sine curve matter less and less to me. I don't have to worry about whether I am happy or sad in any given moment, knowing that whatever my thoughts and emotions happen to be doing at the time, I can inevitably find a deeper feeling that allows me to fully experience my emotional highs and lows without any need to change or control them. Because I'm no longer messing with my emotions, they become surprisingly less messy. Normal service is resumed, and I experience my natural ups and downs without the accompanying story and drama. I'm less hypnotized by my highs or frightened by my lows. In short, I'm able to live my life free from the craving to control my experience by attempting to control the universe of circumstance or the constellation of thought and emotion. Does this mean I wouldn't feel sad when my "show" ends? Not at all. It just means that for the most part, I'm able to experience that sadness without the fear that it will turn into depression or has any significance beyond the temporary reality of the moment. And when my daughter experiences that sadness, I don't need to rescue her or make it better. I get to just love her and enjoy her company. And in that moment, we both fall into the embrace of the world of deeper feeling which surround us... With love, Michael

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