The best Spiritual Skills You Must Know To Beat Emotional Turbulence

Life is like the ocean, and our emotional states is the water. We are sailing this vast openness, with people or without them. With any direction that we want to head in open to us. 

But as with the ocean, storms come and go. Just when everything seems to be smooth and calm, your world becomes a battle to stay afloat. Keep the sails up, make sure to stay on course and bail water out.

This can be overwhelming. A constant knowing that at any point during the day, week or month a storm will hit. 

Scary even. Because we are the ocean, the storm and the ship. Yet if the sink ships, it’s over; just as if the I, faces non-being and being. 

Past trauma affects us with ups and downs, constantly. This is because it’s easier to face ups and downs, no matter how hard; even faced with death. Then it is to cease being identified with anything at all, environment, people, places, God or our own attachments. 

So in a way, our storms are safe ways to know that there is still feeling; no matter how painful. At least we can be attached to it.

Now how do we navigate these feelings?

Read in to find out. Or watch the video I made about it below

Accept Emotions as they come

It’s vital to understand that your emotions are not bad or good. It’s us who label them and run off with how they affect us. If you base your life around emotions and how you feel, your world will look a lot like the North sea.

We may feel a hundred different emotions on a given day. It’s only when we correlate it with something that stresses us out; then the emotion becomes a huge wave. 

I mean before the moment you identified with it, you were okay and felt everything to be stable. Then one moment, a trigger happened which lowered your defences and now this emotion is running wild. 

It’s also worth remembering that we are human.

We have feelings, thoughts, emotions and a whole host of internal dynamics. We’re complicated and tend to make things harder than they should be. It’s part of the human condition. 

Again, it’s neither good nor bad. It is what it is. 

So really internalising that some days we will feel worse than others is in a way self acceptance. Moving forwards with your life and specifically lowering this back & forth is real maturity too.

Think of it as a pendulum that keeps swinging. Try to reduce the duration the pendulum stays in the air when you feel yourself taken away with the emotions. 

You do this by accepting the human condition, not labelling emotions and general self awareness. 

Once you realise it will pass and are no longer attached to emotion, switch your focus to your goals.

These goals, hopefully, will ground you back to the work that needs doing. It reminds you that there is something out there that you’re working for. 

I also mentioned non labelling so that when you look at your goals, your emotion doesn’t spin it as “I don’t have it now, thus I am bad…” 

Which will work in the opposite direction to what you want.

Learn to dis-identify with emotions

I hinted at this above with non labelling. 

In another way, you can remove your focus from an emotion, feeling or thought back to your field of consciousness. 

You may wonder how? But it is quite simple, and hard in practice.

Your field of awareness is how much you can see, feel, touch, think or interact with that which is external to you (or internal). Your consciousness is inside of this awareness. Anything that enters into this consciousness becomes a part of you, but cannot affect you.

A person comes around the corner, they become part of your awareness. If this person was to stop and talk, they would be affecting you. From here, you could choose to ignore them or talk to them.

Depending on what they say, they could bother you, flatter you, make you happy or you could choose to be undisturbed by them.

In other words, they could affect you. And you can choose to be affected. Just the same with emotions.

As an example, let’s say sadness enters your awareness. If you identify with it, you will feel sad and react accordingly. But now, your conscious awareness has shrunk to only that feeling. It is now affecting you because you choose to focus on it. 

Here you can choose to see it, oh! Sadness. Feel sad as humans do, but not focus all attention onto it. Thus, sadness entered your awareness and is. But doesn’t affect you, because it cannot without your consent. 

I am distinct but not separate from my emotions (sadness).

So next time you feel hit by an emotion, pull your consciousness back and view it from your whole awareness. 

This way, other feelings or thoughts will enter that you can also be distinct but not separate from. 

This is a form of psychological non attachment and I’ve found it to be extremely helpful.

You see the content of mind stream being smaller than your consciousness, when you focus on these things, the field of awareness decreases in size. 

Think of reading a book or this article, unless it’s really quite bad, you may be in the flow state where nothing else matters but what’s in front of your eyes.

Create a vision board

A great way to visualise what it is you want out of life is the vision board. 

A selection of images that makes you want to get up and work hard. Pictures of your goals or aspirations, that make you feel a certain way; driven, inspired or helps you remember your Why.

Again, because we now know how to identify with thoughts or feelings. The feelings or drive that gets inspired by them, can be tapped into. Understand that you can choose to let inspiration affect you forwards.

You can let your consciousness collapse onto the feeling of inspiration to help you in your work. Instead of allowing sadness to control you, here you can directly control how you feel.

Again, it’s easier said than done. Especially when you factor in your unique journey and trauma you’ve felt along the way. The older the trauma, the deeper and more rooted your unconscious response will be to it. 

Yet, now you have a tool to use. Detachment doesn’t have to mean separate yourself from reality, because that would lead you to non being. 

Detachment, however, can mean a conscious choice. “I identify with inspiration and my goals”. Will make you more likely to realise them, than “I identify with sadness”. 

I am the way I feel… 

No! You’re not. You chose that. Feelings ultimately are out there, only to come into your awareness, it’s here the choice is made to identify with them.

Listen to your gut

So comes the most important step in anyone’s adventure. 

Listening to your gut and what it says.

It’s so easy to overlook this. It speaks to you in unknown, mysterious and quiet ways. You may think you want something, and yet your gut will tell you no. Either you miss this or hear it.

Most of us ignore, not out of hate, but lack of awareness. We are too caught up in things that decrease the field of consciousness. 

A gut feeling, in whatever form you receive, will be a tiny speck of sand in comparison to the large thought form or Netflix show. 

It’s why people advocate for meditation, nature walks or generally being quiet. When you increase your consciousness, you become closer to God. Then the magic happens.

If you feel the gut feeling and follow Go call to action, your emotions will naturally start to calm out. In a paradoxical way. 

Let me explain:

Following gut feelings isn’t easy by any means. For me, it was to leave home for the first real time, explore different countries and focus on work. My mind is like, bruh, you have only savings. Why are you doing this, get a job. 

Yet what my gut wants is the opposite, it’s not rational and I couldn’t explain it if I tried. Only I know, just as it’s so with you. 

But when you follow these calls, doors begin to open. Things you never expected before, all because you took a “chance”. Putting yourself in the path of opportunity, things that will change your life. 

Your emotions stop playing up so much, because intuitively you sense it will be fine. As long as you put the action in, which won’t be as hard because of the reason above.

Yet your emotions will start flaring up due to your scared, rational mind. It cannot fathom the unknown, so it sends less effective emotional signals. 

Which you now have the power to dis-identify with.

Conclusion

Life is a strange paradox.

Your inner self can be like a sea during a storm or calm as a mill pond. All during the same day, even minutes apart. 

The way to really navigate turbulence is through conscious awareness and the understanding you can identify however you like with things that are external to I & self.

Aim to dis-identify with thoughts, feelings, emotions and external “things”.

Or choose positive reinforcements.

Then get quiet and see what you gut wants. Your soul. God.

You have the power, remember it. 

Good weather,

Elliott.