Your Emotions Are Perfect Feedback and Reveal Hidden Wisdom (Most Replayed Personal Development Wisdom Snippets) | #553

Are your emotions running the show, or helping you see the whole picture?

Snippet of wisdom 90.

In this series, I select my favourite, most insightful moments from previous episodes of the podcast.

Today's snippet comes from Dr. John Demartini, the world-renowned specialist in human behaviour, who talks about how our emotions are feedback mechanisms guiding us toward authenticity and balance.

Press play to learn how to shift from reflexive, reactive thinking to reflective awareness—where emotional wisdom and self-mastery emerge.

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VALUABLE RESOURCES:

Listen to the full conversation with Dr Demartini in episode #250:

https://personaldevelopmentmasterypodcast.com/250

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Coaching with Agi: https://personaldevelopmentmasterypodcast.com/mentor

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Message Agi on PodMatch: https://www.podmatch.com/member/personaldevelopmentmastery

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Personal development interviews exploring key principles of personal development, self improvement, self mastery, personal growth, self-discipline, and personal improvement—all supporting a life of purpose and fulfilment.

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Transcript

Agi Keramidas

Welcome to Personal Development Mastery Podcast, and this is another snippet of wisdom, where I select my most insightful moments from previous episodes. Today's snippet comes from Dr. John Demartini, the world-renowned specialist in human behavior, who talks about how our emotions are feedback mechanisms guiding us toward authenticity and balance. Let's dive right in.

John Demartini

We have reflexive awareness and reflective awareness, like you say. A reflex is outside, extrinsically stimulated, and you're responding. And reflective is we're more introspective and we're listening.And before we respond, we're thinking. In systems one thinking, we react and think. In systems two thinking, we think, then we respond or act.So I've asked that question since I was 23, when I first started teaching neurology. And I feel quite certain that we found solutions to that. Here's how it goes.Whenever you have an emotional reaction, it means you have incomplete perception. Because if you're infatuated with somebody, you're perceiving the upsides, but you're blind to the downsides. You're ignoring the downsides.You're unconscious of the downsides. So in a sense, you're ignorant of the whole. You're only seeing part.And you're now generating an opinion that's got an emotion. And I'm going to make a statement that the purpose of emotions is to offer us, as conscious beings, feedback to let us know when we're not seeing the whole. We're not fully aware.We're ignoring some of what we're experiencing. And we're having a bias and we're in survival mode. And it's offering us feedback to let us know that, that's all.It's giving us symptoms in our body and our psyche to let us know that we're not whole. We're not authentic. Because if we infatuate with something, we'll tend to minimize ourselves to it.And if we minimize ourselves, we're not authentic. And if we resent something and we look down on it, we're conscious of the downsides and unconscious of the upsides, and we're ignoring the upsides. We're going to exaggerate ourselves looking down on people.And that's inauthentic. And so the homeostatic mechanism of the brain is trying to make us authentic. It's trying to teach us how to love.It's trying to teach us to have sustainable, fair exchange. And when you tend to be looking up to people and minimizing yourself, you'll tend to sacrifice for them. Anybody you've been infatuated with, you'll tend to inject their values, try to live by their values and sacrifice for them temporarily for fear of loss of them.And anybody you resent, you'll try to sacrifice them for you narcissistically, because you'll try to get them to live in your values, both of which are futile. And so all the emotional responses and symptoms of our psyche and our physiological responses are feedback mechanisms to let us know we're not authentic. We're ignoring information.We're not seeing the whole, we're not in grace, because the magnificence of life is really magnificent if we see it whole. So those symptoms of emotion are giving us feedback. It's just a homeostatic feedback, just like a thermostat.If it's hot, you're right, we sweat. And if it's cold, we shiver. And they're symptoms to let us know, Hey, we're not in balanced temperature.Let's regulate the temperature and get us back into the center. That's all symptoms are. That's what illness is.And Pythagoras said that in his time. And Galen said that. And Asclepius, the mythological story of Asclepius refers to that.All the great healers knew that. Almost every drug they take in medicine is to try to balance out the chemistries. So the emotions are feedback mechanisms to let us know that we're ignoring key information and we're dividing our consciousness into conscious and unconscious halves and not seeing full consciousness, not being mindful.Now here's the magnificence though. If we infatuate with somebody and we put them on a pedestal and we minimize ourselves, we're too humble to admit what we see in them inside us. So we have a missing part, a disowned part, a deflected part, a deflected part.I'm too humble to admit what I see in them inside me. I'm deflecting what I see. Now we know that when we point our finger at people, three are pointing back.The truth is we have everything we see in them, but we're too humble to admit it. Or if we're resenting them, and we're looking down on them and excited, we're too proud to admit what we see in them inside us. But yep, we've got three fingers pointing back.And it's because we actually have shame and it's reminding us of what we feel ashamed of and we don't want to admit it. So we dissociate from the shame and go into pride to protect ourselves. And we judge them for something we're doing, but we don't want to face it.So we deflect and deflective awareness is reflexive. And so we react reflexively, not reflectively to the impulses to seek or the instincts to avoid. And we're like an animal in survival reacting before we think, because we're in reflexive awareness, not reflective awareness.But now let's say we see somebody we admire, and instead of being too humble to admit what we see in them inside us, what if we asked the question, what specific trait, action or inaction do I perceive this individual displaying or demonstrating that I admire most? And then go to a moment where and when I perceive myself displaying or demonstrating the same or similar trait inside myself. What if I go in there and introspectively reflect and find out where I see what I see in them inside me.And don't stop until the quantity and quality is equal and be accountable for being fully conscious. And now have reflective awareness and level the playing field, where they're not above me and I'm not below, altruistically sacrificing for them and trying to be somebody I'm not, but level the playing field where I value me and I value them. And I make sure I have a sustainable, fair exchange where I have equanimity in me and equity between me and them.Or when I'm resentful, what happens if I go in and find out where I do those behaviors do? And true readers reflect and realize that they have brought into my life to teach me to love all parts of myself and not deny any of them, because at the level of my soul, nothing's missing in me. But at the level of my senses, things appear to be missing in me.And the things that appear to be missing in me are all the things that I'm too proud or too humble to admit that I have. And in that moment, we have pure reflective awareness. And that's exactly, when we balance that, the blood glucose and oxygen activates the executive center and our body is poised and present and gracefully has a balance between the agonist and antagonist and we have movements that's graceful.Graceful movement is a sign of graceful mind. It's really quite beautiful. So our body gives us feedback to try to live a reflective awareness.And you know, when people think they have love for somebody, they confuse a passionate infatuation that's blind, where two people are passionately infatuated and they want to go and procreate and have a sexual passion, instead of that of true love and intimacy. True love and intimacy is where you realize you have pure reflective awareness where that whatever you see in them, you have in your own form and nothing's missing in you and nothing's missing in them and you both have fulfillment. And there's grace and tears of gratitude for reflecting and seeing that what I see in you, I see in me, the God within me and the God within you are meeting.And that is something that transcends the passions. The Stoics and Marcus Aurelius talked about the passions and you could transcend them. It was called eudaimonia by Aristotle verse hedonistic pursuits.And wisdom is coming from that state of pure reflective awareness, not reflexes.

Agi Keramidas

Thank you for listening. You will find the full conversation with Dr. John DeMartini in episode 250. The link is in the show notes.If you found value in this episode, consider supporting the show by visiting personaldevelopmentmasterypodcast.com slash support. You will also find the link in the episode description until next time. Stand out.Don't fit in.