Your internal GPS system AKA your emotions
We are so addicted to our emotions. We think about them. We want to change them. We want to deny them. We label them. We talk about them. We want better ones. I’ve got two words for you. Stop it.
Stop judging your emotions as right or wrong and just be a witness of your emotions. I want you to step outside of yourself and become an observer of your emotions. Rather than labeling emotions as right or wrong, just allow them to be. Look at emotions as your internal GPS because that’s exactly what they are. They aren’t a Global Positioning System GPS, they are a God Provided System GPS. That’s right. God has given us our emotions as a very specific tool. Like all tools, if we don’t read the directions first, we often use them the wrong way.
What is the purpose of an emotion? What emotion do you feel most often? With the alarming rise over the past two decades of prescription anti-anxiety and anti-depression medicine, I bet I know the answer. Not to veer off too strong on a tangent but prescription anti-anxiety and anti-depression medicine is a multi-billion industry. It is estimated that one in ten Americans are on an anti-depressant. We have our kids gobbling up anti-anxiety and anti-depressants and as a society we are really missing the boat. Is the tail wagging the dog? But I digress.
For many, the emotion felt most often is a low vibrating emotion. What do I mean by this? For many years, I followed Dr. Wayne Dyer, who passed in 2015. He’s written many best sellers and he was considered the father of motivation or what I would consider the father of inspiration. I was fortunate to hear him speak several times. At one conference, Dr. Dyer introduced me to a book called Power Versus Force, by Dr. David Hawkins. In this book I discovered the Map of Consciousness and I believe it is perhaps the most enlightening thing I ever discovered. And once I became a Christian and began reading the New Testament it so jived with Jesus’ teaching, that I knew it was a truth for me.
Dr. David Hawkins was a preeminent psychiatrist of last century. After counseling thousands of patients over several decades, Dr. Hawkins created something he called the Map of Consciousness. It is a guide to our emotions and the map is a logarithmic scale from 0 to 1000. Now stay with me. I know I just threw in a curve ball math term. The scale system grades our level of emotions. At the bottom of the scale is shame. Dr. Hawkins calibrated shame to ‘measure’ at a level of 20, which is 10 to the 20th power, 1020. Take 20 tens and multiply them out. The scale then goes up one level to 30, which is guilt. A 30 equals 30 tens multiplied out, another big number. The scale continues to rise. Apathy (hopeless) measures at 40. Grief is a level of 75. Desire is 125. Anger is 150. Pride is 175. Stay with me now. Dr. Hawkins say that any emotion or ‘conscious’ state that measures above 200 is pretty amazing. Therefore, when I wrote that something is a low vibrating emotion, this map of consciousness is what I’m referring to. I’d really encourage you to pause right now and Google™ search “Map of Consciousness” and take just a few minutes to see the scale and read up on it so that you can really dig into this topic.
The scale continues upward and as it climbs so does the vibration. Because this is a logarithmic scale and not a linear scale, just climbing up one level, say from 50 to 60 is a huge, huge difference in frequency. Increasing 10 logarithmic points or 10 to the tenth power or 1010 equals 10 billion. For the average joe, 10 billion has a lot of zeroes in it. All of this to say, as you move up the vibrational scale of emotions, you can really shift and feel so much better or what I like to say, vibrate so much higher.
The reason your emotions are what I call your GPS or God Provided System, is that we should use our emotional GPS just like we use our car or phone’s GPS. After we enter the address of where we are going, the GPS first has to locate where we are. Your GPS doesn’t judge your location. It does not yell at you. It doesn’t ask you how the heck you got there. It’s just registers your current location and then maps the route to the desired location.
Your current emotion or internal GPS system is no different. First plug in to your internal GPS System. Become the silent observer of what emotion you are currently feeling. Are you happy? Are you sad? Are you stressed? Are you tired? Are you joyful? Just notice it. If you then decide that you no longer wish to stay at that location, enter in your desired new location. Just like we can’t go from New Jersey to California in one day, you also can’t go from shame to enlightenment overnight. That will take some work. But you most certainly can enter your location, or your vibration, become aware of it, and map a course to travel somewhere else. In other words, if you aren’t in a happy place, change course, and go to a different place.
Similarly let’s say I plug in my destination and there’s traffic so I have to take a detour. Let’s say I’m sad and I want to go to a happy place. But as I get going, I get sidetracked. That’s OK. I still see the destination and I realize I have to keep moving forward until I get there. I don’t judge the traffic or curse it. Neither does my GPS. It just helps me re-route to my desired destination.
Our emotions are given to us by God to use. They really are a gift. We use them. They don’t use us. We are given our emotions for a clear reason. We aren’t automatons. We are living, breathing, human, BEings. We feel. Because we feel, we are alive. We are gifted with this amazing range of emotions that makes life worth living. The range of emotions is really quite wonderful. If you were always happy and never knew sadness, then could you really appreciate the happiness? One morning when my now 19 year old son Hunter, was around 5, I walked into his room and he was crying. I said “honey, what is the matter?” Hunter turned to me and said, “nothing”…. sniffle sniffle sniffle….”I just love crying. It’s my favorite emotion.” Out of the mouth of babes!
Your emotions tell you where you are as well as where you are headed. In Yogi Berra’s infamous words, “if you don’t know where you are headed, you’ll end up somewhere else.” It’s really taken me years to recognize that I am in the driver’s seat. My emotions don’t control me. I control my emotions. I control the destination. I control what route I will go to get there. My emotions are just a reflection of my current state of mind. They aren’t good or bad. They just are. And I enjoy watching them. If I’m in an emotion of sadness for too many days in a row, for me it’s like being parked in a parking garage. I don’t hate the parking garage. I just don’t want to stay there. So I plug into to something else. I don’t want to waste time on how I got to the garage, I just want to get moving. I may get lost going out of the garage and get side tracked. Eventually I will get out! And as I enter ‘beautiful sunset’ or ‘time with my husband or son’ or ‘time alone in meditation’ as my destination, I allow my GPS to take me there.
