This post is a useful pre-requisite for my next post on empowered relationships. If we’re not allowing ourselves full access to our cognitive abilities, we’re not allowing ourselves the liberty to think and act in alignment with who we are. The good news is that it’s easy to discern how much access we’re allowing ourselves and to adjust to maximize our brain power.
Liberty and Neuroscience
True personal liberty means taking responsibility for how you feel in every moment because how you feel determines the quality of your thoughts and decision making.
In other words, liberty is clarity, and clarity is liberty.
Neuroscience shows that when humans feel fear-based emotions like anger, frustration, irritation, or any unpleasant emotion, we lose access to the frontal lobe of our brain. The frontal lobe is the part of the brain that facilitates clear thought, coherent speech, and rational decision making. The frontal lobe is also the seat of our personality.
This means, when we’re feeling an unpleasant emotion, we’re literally not ourselves.
We’re experiencing what neuroscientist Dr. Alan Watkins calls a DIY lobotomy. We’re poorly equipped to take responsible, inspired action, articulate our ideas and thoughts, or make intelligent decisions. Given the deliberate perpetuation of fear in mainstream media and society, it's no wonder that so many people seem like zombies; a perpetual state of fear is a perpetual state of restricted cognitive function.
I recommend Dr. Watkins' talk, “How to be brilliant everyday” as a foundation for this concept:
Conversely, when we are somewhere in the range of love, contentment, happiness, and joy, we not only feel good, which is what all of us are chasing anyway, but we also have clarity. We have access to that very important part of our brain, which means we can think and communicate clearly, and we have the liberty to come up with new ideas and solutions.
Great News!
Here's the best part:
It’s up to you and you alone to choose where you want to be on the emotional spectrum, which means you can always choose liberty by choosing love over fear (every unpleasant emotion is rooted in fear).
Clarity and liberty are gifts you give yourself when you take responsibility for how you feel in every moment by understanding that how you feel is a choice.
No condition or person can “make” you be in a good or bad mood but you.
Choosing liberty starts by acknowledging your responsibility to yourself to access as much clarity as possible by consciously choosing to feel good as much as possible.
With that said, unpleasant emotions are not “bad” but rather are incredibly important indicators that you’ve cut yourself off from who you really are. You’re mid-DIY-lobotomy, and you can stop that process at any time by choosing to feel better.
I love this image from Mark Passio’s Natural Law seminar as it depicts how our perception (which stems from the emotions we feel in regard to the beliefs we hold) determines our ability to see "what is."
High frequency or high vibrational emotions are those that feel good and those that align us most often with truth. The worse you feel, the slower your vibration, which means you’re rendezvousing with truth less and less frequently, which means your liberty to analyze and synthesize information is restricted.
Have you ever had a conversation with someone who was really angry or sad, and no matter what kind of logic and information you presented or how calmly and lovingly you presented it, they kept repeating the same things as if you'd said nothing? Then later, after they were feeling better, they said something like “I see exactly what you were saying. It's all so clear now.” They re-established a higher frequency and thus re-aligned with truth.
Emotional Awareness, Clarity, and Liberty
Pay attention to how you’re feeling. If you’re feeling confident and content, it’s a good time for you to have an in-depth conversation, write a Steemit post, or tackle a project. If you’re not in the love/happiness spectrum, stop and adjust to get your brain back and re-align with truth.
Acknowledge the emotion you’re feeling and recognize that you’re telling yourself a bogus story about yourself, a person, or a situation and/or that you’re looking at yourself, a person, or a situation in a way that is incongruent with truth. Just as it doesn't feel good to lie to someone else, it doesn't feel good to lie to yourself, which is what you're doing in a state of fear.
When you give yourself the gifts of happiness and liberty and consequently clarity, you and everyone around you benefits. Rather than being run by fear (and thus operating with only partial brain function), you are consciously choosing effective speech and actions as a result of clear, rational thinking.
Imagine a world where everyone accesses their full capacity to think and act in alignment with who they truly are. That is a liberated world, and that liberated world starts with liberated individuals: emotionally aware and emotionally autonomous individuals.
Thanks for reading! Comments and discussion welcomed :)
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