 Hey there, and aloha. It's been a while, huh? Okay, true story. Recently, I was doing a Patch Tarot reading, and the spread was all cups. So I started to reflect on the nature of not just my emotions, but the emotional body of humanity and the collective consciousness. There's a whole field of feels out there. The last time Patch took you on a journey about the nature of emotions, it was with a very logical and linear perspective. Which is, you know, a pretty masculine thing to do. But emotions aren't linear. They're up, down, all around, and often very cyclical. Maybe even spiral. When it comes to feeling emotions, I think we can mostly all agree that we, meaning our self with a capital S, are not our emotions. But it wouldn't also be wrong to suggest that the experience of emotions is separate from us. When we feel something, it's like a wave moving through us. And if it's a strong wave, it can totally sweep us into the bliss of a divine moment, or crash us into emotional chaos. Emotions lift and drop our experience of life. But we must understand that there is an unmoving self behind our emotions that isn't affected by the emotions, only experiences them. In the Hindu tradition, this dynamic is called prakriti and purusha. Prakriti is a word that describes essentially the field of energy that makes up the whole created universe, which means your body, your emotions, and your thoughts, as well as everything in your life and the whole planet too. But then, there is purusha, the unmoving, limitless and permanent self, capital S, which can also be known as simply consciousness, divine intelligence, or cosmic principle. Within each of us, if we go deep enough into meditation and the inner stillness, eventually we pass through the illusion of prakriti and discover the purusha, the pure consciousness, and recognize we are divine. For example, you can see your consciousness then, purusha, as a canvas of potential creativity, which then gives rise to the paints and colors of your experience, the prakriti. Within your whole experience, it could be said that you have many layers to yourself. The mental body, the emotional body, the spiritual or astral body, along with the physical body. But within the emotional body itself, there is a great deal of substance, both positive and negative. You might perceive the emotional body like a large pond of water. It's highly sensitive to any kind of movement or stimulation. If something swims through it or you throw a rock in, that ripple is going to pass through the whole pond. For people who take time to meditate regularly, their emotional body is very calm and tranquil, where other people's emotional bodies are more like the ocean itself. We can see that many parts of our emotional bodies may be more like the depths of the ocean itself. We can go deeper and deeper and uncover mysterious and hidden things the further we go. Like that crazy alien squid, did you see that? Anyway, the point being that we have the capacity for all emotions within us. It is through practice of becoming still and quiet, that we learn to feel things that we didn't even know we were feeling, and heal our relationship with our emotional body. This is why learning to quiet the mind or be in a state of emotional peacefulness is a key step in conscious awareness and mastery. Emotions interact with our mind and thoughts, along with our sensory experiences, and create a kind of color, vibrancy and feeling to whatever we're experiencing. Part of the journey of the soul is overcoming the attachment to those feelings in order to experience a greater connection with reality. Another part of the journey is that generally speaking, a person is only able to understand what they are emotionally mature enough to process within themselves. I know I don't have to describe to you what positive and negative emotions feel like. On average, when someone is in love, they have a spring in their step, with more overall enthusiasm in each moment. Love changes the human experience. On the other hand, when you're depressed, you feel boxed in, dark and lethargic. You could be at a party with all of your friends and still find yourself in the corner wanting to leave. This depressed quality of emotions is usually based on shame, fear, apathy, guilt, or grief. Then there's probably a whole lot of people who have nulled their emotions so much that they hardly even know they're there. Maybe that's like the pond being frozen. Now you might be wondering, what is the most ideal or optimal state for someone's emotional body? Plus, how do you manage your own field in the presence of others who are insistent on salty storms? Well, one thing Thoth loves to remind us in the Emerald Tablets is to balance our polarities. Within the dance of Purusha and Prakriti, one is infinitely ever non-moving, and the other is constantly subject to change. Yet when we bring the one into balance with the other, inner harmony is attained. We cannot control others, but we can control how we react on an emotional level. And the more we take time to still our emotional body, the easier we can learn how to fully feel what we're feeling and then respond accordingly. And remember, no response is still a response. Our inner power comes from our ability to perceive truth clearly and take loving action or inaction effectively in support of that truth. Just as water responds to being disturbed and even takes different shapes based on the frequencies it's exposed to, so does our emotional body. To use our pond analogy, an emotional response is like a pebble being dropped into water. The water responds by rippling and vibrating outwards. That ripple expands, moving all the water around it, growing wider as it moves. While it can sound chaotic, this expansion is required in order for the water to return back to a place of stillness. It must work that energy through the entirety of its body until it eventually returns back to stillness. So you see, it's really quite simple. How do you emotionally settle down? Stop throwing rocks in the pool. Perhaps this is why a strong emotional experience can feel overwhelming when you first experience it, whether positive or negative. In the moment of first having the pebble or emotion triggered within your field, you experience the largest impression of it, including a large splash. But then, there is time for it to settle, and if you don't keep throwing rocks in, you can return to calm. That said, you might recall the principle of polarity from our video on the Seven Hermetic Principles, which says that everything exists both in a state of balance and has an opposing force. Every yin has a yang, and the most common examples are hot and cold. This principle says that even opposing forces are identical in nature, simply differing degrees of intensity and emotions work in the same way. You might consider then that each emotion has several states it can be in, its own opposite emotion, a neutral point of balance, and every degree in between each pole. Courage has a polarity of cowardice, trust has a polarity of mistrust, care has a polarity of apathy, joy has a polarity of sadness, faith has a polarity of doubt, and love has a polarity of fear. But the secret is, we're not supposed to just accept that we sometimes are courageous and sometimes fearful. We are only stuck in the polarity if we are unable to free ourselves from our limited thinking. The more time we take to balance our polarities, as Thoth says, we can become anchored in a higher state of being, a state of perpetual love, courage, faith, trust, in the infinite connection that you have with the divine intelligence. This is the state of the capital S self, that which is beyond the waves of emotions, but still experiences them without attachment. In this, we find true freedom in the world, but not of it. Now, from a more human perspective, we gotta talk about this. Are our responses to our emotional experiences really our own? How much of our reactions are just there because we have been conditioned to react that way? Our level of awareness about our feelings and why we feel what we do is connected to how much of a whole awareness we have over our body of consciousness, thoughts, and feelings. The more we work with ourselves spiritually, both our light and our shadow, the more we illuminate the swirling inner chaos and bring it to stillness. You see, perceiving our emotional life perceiving our emotional body as a field and a wave, you can see how other people's emotions can sweep through you in a flurry. This happens a lot in the mainstream media of the world. As the past few years, we've seen a lot of people getting offended and reacting very poorly to the circumstances of our world and our present reality. There's nothing inherently bad about this. It's part of our collective journey together, including its extreme and rough-edged polarities. Maybe you noticed yourself having a particular reaction to something because someone else reacted in the same way. This is what we're talking about. When you know that you are the unmoving self and you find yourself carrying some negative emotional weight, you can help create some awareness that you are not that, but it is something that is moving through you. You are not the rock or the water that's rippling, but the entirety of the container in its wholeness. Knowing this, you can also identify when you are reacting from a memory of a past trauma buried in your subconscious, and in that moment, you can ask yourself if there is a higher place you can observe yourself from within. A good example of this is to think about being in a rushing river or standing on a bridge over one. Hey, we even did a parable on this a while ago. When you're in the river, you're helpless to the river's current. If you can't get your footing because the water is too deep, you have no choice but to let the water carry you to wherever it wants to take you. Further, when you're in the river, you have a very limited viewpoint of what is happening outside of it. On the other hand, if you are standing on the bridge over the river, you can feel the energy of the water, sense the speed and swiftness it has, and even get a sense of the depth if you're close enough to it, but you are not in it. You can notice it, understand it, without being swept away by it. You also have the added vantage point of seeing where the source of the river is, as well as the context and landscape that surrounds you. These are two very different experiences, but in each one, you are interacting with the river with your awareness. Naturally, you can imagine the first experience of being swept away by the river as an example of being completely caught up in our emotions to the point that we become them, and that's all we see and perceive. It might be fine and well to do this consciously sometimes, such as when you're passionately engaged in a project. Just have a mindset that allows you to swim out and sit on the riverbank when you're ready for a break. The second scenario provides us an example of having a higher emotional awareness, having a solid footing where you can exist in the presence of the emotion, but remain unmoved and present to more than just that one flow, because there's a much larger reality to be aware of. Here, we can make conscious choices about what to do about how we feel, instead of our emotions completely taking over and manifesting themselves through our unconscious behavioral patterns. Ultimately, the moral of this story is that if we learn to acknowledge and engage our emotional awareness without giving it complete control of us or losing control to it, we can more consciously experience all of the beauty, love, and connection that is there for us to discover in the journey of life. We can become masters of the emotional experience, as opposed to being mastered by it. So the next time you feel your emotions rising, ask yourself if you are experiencing the emotion from within the river or if you are observing it from the bridge. I'm sure you'll be surprised by how quickly your emotional state can shift when you start to notice yourself like this. It's a full body experience that often requires your whole loving attention. So be kind to yourself even if you are just observing. And speaking of observing, remember at the beginning of this video where I started talking about how this all came about. Truth is, everything we discussed, our wisdom teachings, also found in the tarot, especially with the suit of cups. This is what this suit teaches us and was the inspiration for this video. Patch tarot has been a labor of love for us for many years, and it's evolved a few times with our own higher understanding. It's been part of our journey and heart's calling for many years to create things that serve you in your ascension into the light of a higher consciousness and patch tarot may just be one of the most resonant tools we've ever made. If you're curious to learn more or are just ready to dive in and grab a copy, please visit our website linked in the description to get your own copy of Patch Tarot and see for yourself why almost all of the product reviews are five stars. It's been a blessing to journey with you today about our emotions and I'll see you again soon for more emotional magic.