emotions of anger and lust. Somewhere along the way, we came to think that our feelings were in need of policing to assure our acceptance as virtuous people.
We don't like negative feelings because they are emotionally and physically uncomfortable. This instinct isn't wrong. Recent research shows negative feelings that become chronic can impact our health. Susan Everson-Rose, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, along with her associates, found that depression raised the risk of stroke or ministroke by 86 percent, chronic stress increased it 59 percent, while hostility doubled the risk. These findings for the 7,000 adults ages 45–84 in the study remained constant over eight and a half years even when age, race, sex, health behaviors, and other known risk factors were taken into account. At the start, none of the subjects had experienced a stroke or ministroke. The authors conclude that if we want to prevent strokes, we need to pay attention to stress and emotions and how they affect us.2
Similarly, Emory University researchers reviewed 3,200 coronary angiography patients and found that women under fifty-five with depression had twice the risk of dying from a heart condition or experiencing a heart attack.3
The American Institute of Stress, which reviews stress research, estimates that stress-related and stress-induced illnesses account for 75–90% of the one-billion visits Americans make to the doctor annually.4 And Madhu Kalia from Thomas Jefferson University suggests that disabilities caused by stress are just as great as the disabilities caused by workplace accidents or other common medical conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, and arthritis.5
What are we to do? Feelings have a spontaneous life of their own, and if painful ones become chronic, they cause emotional and physical suffering and harm.
In 1995, Daniel Goleman's groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence, Why It Can Matter More than IQ established the radical importance of emotions. He showed how feeling frequently trumps thinking as an automatic response to life. This bias develops because the emotional brain existed long before the rational brain, “which gives evolved emotional centers immense power to influence the functioning of the rest of the brain—including its centers for thought.”6 Furthermore, the emotional part of the brain learns in a different way from the logical part.
Success or failure in your work and relationships is dependent on how you manage your feelings. The trouble is, precious few of us stop to think about what we're feeling. Our attention is drawn instead to activity around us while our unnoticed inner state initiates most of our behavior. In other words, our reflexive reactions are largely motivated by feelings to which we pay little attention. This is not a recipe for success.
If I were to ask you, “What are you feeling right now?” would you know? Unless you're in the middle of an emotional event, chances are your answer would be, “I have no idea.” Roget's Thesaurus includes more than 3,000 words related to emotion, yet most of us are intimidated by our personal psychology because it's invisible and uncontrollable. So, we avoid thinking about how we feel, while at the same time, we can't stop thinking about how we feel. That's quite an interesting paradox.
So how do we begin to bring our feelings into our conscious awareness? And then how do we allow them to evaporate? You're holding the answer in your hands.
MIND TO MATTER
Do you ever feel overwhelmed by uncomfortable emotions? As if they have consumed you? Everyone has experienced this at one time or another. Because feelings are perceived as unseen and uncontrollable, they can seem like scary ghosts chasing us no matter how much we want them gone. Yet when we give form to our feelings, they suddenly have boundaries. When emotions are measurable, the mind accepts them rather than ignoring them.
What is the color of love? How heavy is sadness? What is the size of anger or the density of pain? Goodbye, Hurt and Pain will help you imagine the form and function of your feelings by looking through an organic lens. Mother Nature is a great teacher with the awe-inspiring workings of the Universe. We, too, are created with life's inherent sense of order and urge to thrive. Since our bodies are a reflection of Nature, we can use the natural world as a metaphor to solve our problems. As early as 1452, men studied birds closely in order to understand flight; the Wright brothers gained insight from observing pigeons when designing the first airplane.7 This concept is now a scientific discipline called biomimicry, which comes from the Greek words bios for “life” and mimesis “to imitate.” Similarly, Goodbye, Hurt and Pain uses Nature as metaphor to comprehend emotions better.
Physics is one of the oldest explored natural sciences—the study of matter and its motion through space and time, along with related concepts of energy and force. In general, physics helps us understand how the universe behaves. Goodbye, Hurt and Pain uses processes in physics as metaphors to give shape and movement to invisible emotions, similar to the way scientists imagined invisible forces like gravity, electricity, and electromagnetism even before their existence was proven. As feelings take form, the rational brain engages with matters of the heart, and our emotions become manageable in ways we've not considered until now.
Emotions predictably expand and contract, and throughout this book we'll look at how taming big, uncomfortable, invisible feelings and memories can help you gain an exhilarating sense of emotional mastery. Once you know how to dial in to your feelings, your native emotional intelligence begins to respond much like a self-cleaning oven, problem-solver, and success magnet. And results come quickly. You will find yourself resolving deep-rooted problems and manifesting your dreams at speeds as fast as Google search results. Again, the answers originate outside the logical mind.
You'll learn how emotions work—and how to have yours working effortlessly for you—through recent neuroscientific findings and compelling real-life stories. You will also have an opportunity to practice ramping up your own emotional intelligence through Practice It Yourself sections at the end of each chapter.
HOW I CAME TO THESE METHODS: THE STORY OF RIM
It's 1998, the phone rings, and it's my client Ellie, checking in to see if I've reopened my psychotherapy practice as planned. It's no surprise that she's calling because her work is unfinished; she's the only client I had referred to another therapist before I left on a family sabbatical to Australia. We talk, and as I hang up, I hear a voice say: “If you go back to doing what you used to do, you'll get sick.” I stop in my tracks and wonder: “Who said that?” It definitely wasn't my client, and it certainly wasn't my conscious mind. If this is my intuition speaking, it's a total surprise! Ah, I remember that's how true intuition works—it drops in without preceding thought or emotion.
This turning point in my career took me places I never expected. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, I was setting out on an adventure, moving toward something new and exciting, something I didn't know and to which I was strongly drawn. It turns out I was on a quest to discover an inventive way of working with feelings. And discover it I did.
When I began exploring a new way of processing emotions, I set aside expectations of what I believed possible and impossible. Rather, I decided to let clients show their capacities without limits. I have been amazed at the results. In fact, the speed of remarkable change in the real-life stories shared in these pages can seem almost too rapid to be believed. I and others have witnessed it time and time again. Their stories lend credence to the immense inner resilience in all of us. This evidence convincingly
