Let’s talk about controlling your emotions, or rather the importance of it. Not everybody’s favorite topic, I know. A lot of us, especially I have found in social circles I overlap with, really dislike the word ‘control’. It brings up a lot of negative connotations. Many of us are looking for liberation, flexibility, freedom of expression, or just freedom. And ‘control’ pretty much sounds like the opposite of that.

I ask that you hear me out.

Usually, we are looking for something because we don’t have it. If you’re looking for freedom, you probably feel oppressed. If you’re looking for flexibility, it’s most likely because you feel stifled or contained. By that same notion, if you don’t have control of your emotions, its likely that they have control of you.

Not controlling your emotions is the birthing ground for anxiety, stress, depression, pessimism and a victim mindset. I frequently find that people in my life that have chronic problems with negative self-talk or a generally negative outlook on life are sitting in the day-to-day quagmire of being steam-rolled by their emotions. It’s like trying to keep your head above water when the water line keeps getting higher.

What I don’t mean

When I stress the importance of controlling emotions, I do not in any way mean to shut down, ignore, or distance yourself from your emotions. I can’t think of anything more detrimental to your health or success than that. Your emotions act as a thermometer and warning system for your body and mind. They tell us a lot about our current state of being. Warning systems are meant to be listened to. However, there is a vast difference between heeding a warning system and allowing it to decide the course of action by which solutions are found.

Think of controlling your emotions like running a ship

Let’s say you’re the Titanic (depressing analogy, I know, but bear with me). You have a transcriber (your nervous system) that is taking in data and messages all day and converting them to electrical impulses that are transmitted around the ship (body) and to other nearby vessels (our social circle). Those messages are a constant mix of good, bad, happy, sad, congratulations, observations, warnings, reviews, feedback, you name it (stimuli for want of a better word). It’s the transcriber’s job to sift through all that data, pass on what needs to be passed on, disregard what’s not important, and process everything so it gets to the right place. Your emotions serve as the messaging system in which that data is conveyed, each one like a little memo to a different part of the ship.

The transcriber shouldn’t be labeling messages as good or bad. You wouldn’t want a secretary changing the subject lines of your emails, would you? Nor would you want a secretary holding on to messages for an undue amount of time and delaying important information either. Not when the information conveyed could be the difference between changing course correctly or sinking in the middle of the Atlantic.

Not learning to control your emotions essentially hands over the keys to the bridge to the guy translating morse code in the closet. He’s great at processing vast amounts of correspondence and information but he knows not the first thing about nautical charts, crow’s nests, or steam engines. He can get you the warnings, but he doesn’t have the experience to decide what to do with them.

Not to bore you with the ship analogy, but that’s what the captain is for. I mean you. Your brain. You have the ability to take those warnings, apply context and previous experiences, and make decisions that are based on rational thought as much as they are influenced by your emotions.

What controlling your emotions means:

When I’m talking about controlling your emotions, I specifically mean not allowing them to make your choices for you. This still requires you to acknowledge them and feel them. Perhaps more so than the average person. You can’t control something you’re not paying attention to.

We’ve all heard that person say “yeah, i’m just in my feelings”, “I’m letting this get to me.”, “I know I shouldn’t stew on this, but I can’t help it.” This is what we want to work on: Feeling our feelings without letting those feelings control our day. That’s where eventually the mindset changes will occur and freedom will follow.

Feeling your Feelings

Remember when I said that I didn’t mean shutting down or distancing yourself from your emotions? Let’s go back to that. The key to controlling your emotions is in making room for them. You have to allow yourself time to process them and make peace with what’s happening in your life. If you do not address your feelings, they fester and begin to bleed through into other areas of your life. Your job is not to judge your feelings, comment on your feelings necessarily, or ascribe positives or negatives to your feelings. Your job is to sit with them in the moment and allow yourself to actually feel them before we ever touch on the matter of figuring out what they are trying to tell us.

The warmth in your chest that is love. The Icy dagger that is sometimes fear. A trip drum in your chest might be anxiety and the hot flush and shaking hands might be anger. Don’t try to rush your body through the process of physically feeling them.

Your challenge

In future talks we’ll go through practices for analyzing emotions and figuring out what our emotions are trying to tell us, as well as tools (like mindfulness and meditation) for how to make space in our day to day lives to reflect on those emotions and what may have influenced them. But for now, your challenge (should you choose to accept it) is to practice acknowledging your feelings on a day to day basis without judging them or analyzing them. and to allow yourself a few moments to really sit in them when they happen.

It doesn’t have to be a big to do or routine- I get it, we’re all busy. This might mean a mental “okay, I’m angry” when you feel it. But there should be no shame in the mental acknowledgment of “I’m angry”. Even more important is to acknowledge the positive ones: “This is Joy” as we often highlight the negatives in our life but don’t hold equal space for the positives. Take a second to pay attention to what that emotion physically feels like in your body. Then you can go about your day. But learning to identify what an emotion feels like is the first step to emotional clarity and control that we’ll be working toward in future talks.

We’d love to hear about your experiences! Remember, you don’t have to be perfect and you’re not going to get it right overnight or all at once.

All the best,

Mikaela

Let’s talk about intention setting. It’s something you hear thrown around directly and indirectly all the time. From mindset and goalsetting gurus to psychologists and even the old adage ‘It’s the thought that counts’; your intentions guide almost everything you do. We place a lot of moral weight behind someone’s stated or hidden intentions. The concept of intentions has sparked some of humanities oldest proverbs and colloquialisms:  

• The road to hell is paved with good intentions. 
• Let a wrong-doing repeat itself at least three times: the first may be an accident, the second a mistake, but the third is likely to be intentional. 
• He who covers up his mistakes intends to make some more. 
• No matter how brilliant an action, it should not be considered great unless it was the result of a great motive. 

This is one of the fundamental differences in the conversation between magic believers and non-magic believers. Some people would argue that it’s the difference between magic and science, but I fall into the camp of people that believe all magic is science that we don’t have the ability to explain yet. That doesn’t make it not magic. Things that we now refer to as common knowledge science would have gotten you burned at the stake 400 years ago. Then there are those things that I believe mankind just isn’t meant to unravel or dissect- they just are part of the magic of existing. 

Whilst I hate being the kind of person that loads you up with definitions- some things bear defining. So let’s start there.  

Stated simply your intentions are your goals, aims, hopes, and meanings. Intentions encompass everything from all that you hope to accomplish to the thoughts behind actions you do for and to others. That’s a lot of weight to put on one little word.  

Intention setting is one of those science meets magic subjects that I love. Why? Because right now- the majority of people on the planet consider it hippy woo-woo metaphysical, magical, mystical and otherwise two solid frog hops from the Crazy Pond. Meanwhile the Scientific community is just starting to seriously explore the concept of intentionality in serious depth. We’re at one of those awesome crossroads where we can watch the process of the scientific being used to explain the magical. Its an exciting thing.  

The basic concept of formal Intention Setting is the basis for most forms of magic. Intention setting is the first step in Manifesting. It is the spark and creative power that pushes our desires, hopes, and dreams out into the universe so the Law of Attraction can work is magic. Setting an intention is more than just stating what you want and waiting for it to happen. It’s a purposeful direction of psychic and physical energy toward a goal. Anything less is just a wish.  

We talk about setting intentions constantly for both big and little projects, seasons, our lives; Before rituals, going into classes and experiences. “What are your intentions? What are you hoping to get out of this?” Setting intentions means being mindful of your thoughts and your inner dialogue. 

The law of attraction is founded on the premise that the quality of our most prevalent thoughts, moods and attitudes determines the quality of what we manifest in our lives (What Is The Law Of Attraction? – Forbes Health). Its quite literally the power of the mind and how it interacts with the positive and negative energies of the world.  

Ever had someone turn to you and say “Mind over Matter”?  

This isn’t a new concept. I mentioned in a previous post a quote by Napolean Hill “The Mind attracts the things it dwells upon.” Which is a more condensed version of his original “Our minds become magnetized with the dominating thoughts we hold in our minds and these magnets attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonize with the nature of our dominating thoughts”.  

In an Article by Forbes, Christy Whitman, a master-certified law of attraction coach in Scottsdale, Arizona, the founder of The Quantum Success Coaching Academy and author of The Desire Factor, has a great way of explaining the basics of the theory: 

“Thanks to the contribution of Albert Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2, we now understand that matter and energy are inseparable, and that energy is the basis of everything in our tangible universe,” she continues “Everything that manifests in the physical world does so by a process of resonant energies being drawn together.” Whitman explains that it’s like when a C chord is struck on a piano. “Every other key that is tuned to the chord of C quivers in response to the note that’s been sounded, because frequencies that resonate at a similar vibration are magnetized together,” What Is The Law Of Attraction? – Forbes Health 

Some of the most successful people in the world swear by the ‘Power of Positive Thinking’. Oprah Winfrey discusses it in her book ‘The Secret’. Other celebrity names include Jim Carrey, Lady Gaga, Denzel Washington, and Jennifer Lopez. Whilst I am not a huge follower of tinsel town- what I’m getting at is that there are some very successful mainstream icons that are beginning to recognize the science behind it. The idea also falls in line with the Power of Association (when your parents used to say “I don’t want you hanging out with so-and-so, they’re a bad influence!) and the idea that like attracts like. It’s the concept that the direction and intention of your thoughts has the ability to interact with the Intentions and purpose of the Universe; and in the words of Bernard Shaw “We know there is intention and purpose in the universe, because there is intention and purpose in us.” 

When we talk about intention setting in magic we’re talking about the power of setting your mind to something, of setting yourself firmly on a decision or path and using your will to make it happen.  

According to Bruce Lipton, an American Developmental Biologist and former professor of Epigenetics states that when we set intentions “the beliefs we hold in our minds are converted into electromagnetic fields by nerve cells and the brain ‘broadcasts’ this information to all of the cells within our body. Cells respond to the information in these energy fields and use it to control their behavior and gene activity.” On the flipside of that same coin, if we are prone to negative thinking and fail to set positive intentions within our lives, our cells will respond by preparing to Fight-or-Flight, adding stressor triggers subconsciously in our day to day lives. 

Science is beginning to be able to measure and demonstrate this. If you want to read more about the connection between biology, the brain and mindfulness and how intention setting can affect our neurology and in turn our physiology, this article (The Biology Of Intention-Setting: Our Body’s Response To Activating The Mind – Thrive Global) talks a lot about Dr. Richard Davidson and his work on Neuroplasticity. 

Another Phenomenal Read is “The Intention Experiment” By Lynn McTaggart which draws on findings of leading scientists around the world. McTaggart uses cutting-edge research conducted at Princeton, MIT, Stanford, and other universities and laboratories to discuss how intent is capable of profoundly affecting all aspects of our lives.  

One of my favorite Excerpts from that book is a quote from William A. Tiller, a professor emeritus at Standford University. “For the last 400 years, an unstated assumption of science is that human intention cannot affect what we call physical reality. Our experimental research of the past decade shows that, for todays world and under the right conditions, this assumption is no longer correct.”  

The farther science gets into the study of intentions setting, the more power they are finding resides in the mind. We are even beginning to use the power of intention setting in psychology as a form of therapy and trauma healing as well as traditional medicine. Doctors discuss the idea of “setting the intention to get well, even if you don’t know how to yet.” That the idea of openly stating an intention to get well, to heal your body, and to focus on your health in that time can act upon the subconscious and not only speed up the natural process, but actually open pathways in the body that trigger the body’s natural healing processes on its own. Your body is designed to heal itself- it wants to be at homeostasis. It’s essentially stimulating an immune response. 

If you’ve ever heard someone say, “you can’t help someone that doesn’t want to get better.” It falls under this same principle, just on a smaller, more subconscious scale.  

Now this isn’t to say that chanting “I am going to get better.” Is going to cure you of cancer. Modern Medicine still plays a roll and for very good reasons; your mind cannot fix 100% of anything- but it does play a huge role. Who knows what science will discover in the next ten and twenty years; in the meantime, the notable improvement in processes of the body that are already there make it worth pursuing. I can’t see why someone wouldn’t use every tool at their disposal to help their body do what it needs to do. If I had an infection and a doctor told me to drink lots of water, get extra rest, take lots of vitamin B and an antibiotic- I wouldn’t skip out on the vitamin B but do everything else. Sure, you’ll probably get better otherwise, but why wouldn’t you try and do it faster? If you’re trying to bake a cake and you only use 90% of the ingredients- you’ll still end up with something edible- but it might not be as good.  

The truth behind most modern Magic is at the end of the day pretty simple and straightforward. In more elegant words it’s a combination of intention setting and intense gratitude for what the universe gives us. Call it self-fulfilling prophecy, or the placebo effect. To dumb it down even further- its spicy psychology. And you can label it hippy woo-woo if you choose too but seeing the world the way that I want to and slowly manifesting or out-stubborning it until it reflects my vision has worked pretty well for me for twenty-eight years.  

That’s basically all it is. I decide what I want to happen. I set my intentions, very specifically. I focus my whole being on what it is I am trying to accomplish or manifest. Sounds simple huh? But simple and easy aren’t the same thing. Sure, you can say it out loud; whatever the intention may be. But at that point its just a wish more less. We’re talking about actual magnetism and attraction, which works on a molecular level. Its about actively changing your personal narrative and your subconscious on a chemical level. Which is harder than it sounds because humans are complex creatures.  

This is in some way, another area that the idea of mindfulness comes into play. You have to be aware of your intentions and your thoughts and your focus in order to direct them. And it takes discipline to build that skill. You’d be amazed at the number of people walking around the world with their thoughts higgledy-piggledy (or maybe you wouldn’t be) with little to no actual awareness of their thoughts or intentions. How many times do you hear “I dunno, I just didn’t think about it.” In response to a question regarding why they did something. And thoughtlessness is exactly it. The awesome thing about this though, is that its totally fixable. Its learnable. It’s something that you are in complete control of within your life.  

I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter, your experiences, or your questions. If you’re so inclined, please accept my challenge: Take a few minutes to set yourself an intention. Start small, and don’t give yourself a list a mile long (rule one of goal setting/ habit creating/ or manifesting). Pick one thing. Be Specific. Write it down. Say it out loud. Declare it to the Universe (note here I say the universe and not ‘people’). Pay close attention to how your personal narrative talks about it and thinks about it in your head. Any time you catch yourself referring to it in the negative correct it. Don’t just stop the negative- you must replace it with the positive. Repeat it to yourself multiple times a day. Affirm it. Be very intentional with this one thing. For 60 days. Then come back and tell me what happened and how you feel about it. 

Now go get intentional! 

All the best, 

Mikaela