{"id":1060,"date":"2020-08-29T14:45:15","date_gmt":"2020-08-29T14:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spiraldanceshamanics.com\/beta2020\/?p=1060"},"modified":"2020-08-29T14:45:53","modified_gmt":"2020-08-29T14:45:53","slug":"honing-our-emotional-intelligence-with-shamanic-medicine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spiraldanceshamanics.com\/beta2020\/honing-our-emotional-intelligence-with-shamanic-medicine\/","title":{"rendered":"Honing Our Emotional Intelligence with Shamanic Medicine"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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*The following is an excerpt from the book\u00a0\u201cDreaming of Cupcakes: A Food Addict\u2019s Shamanic Journey into Healing:\u201d<\/a><\/p>

We humans spend so much time stuffing, denying, spewing, and avoiding our feelings that we never stop to ask them what they mean.\u00a0 In the book \u201cThe Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings are Trying to Tell You,\u201d social researcher Karla McLaren catalogues the emotions and tracks what they are actually trying to tell us on a deeper level. I used to find it helpful to put them into one of two categories: love and fear.\u00a0 I used to try to deny fear and focus only on love. But this was a futile exercise. The problems with these ways of approaching emotions are: love is not an emotion, denial is not an honest reflection of what is so in the moment, and fear is not an enemy.<\/p>

The so-called \u201cdark\u201d emotions are not our enemies either: fear, anger, shame, rage, and hatred.\u00a0 Fear connects us to our deepest instincts and points us towards actions that must be taken to ensure safety, for example.\u00a0 McLaren\u2019s book is filled with practices that support readers in mastering this empathic work.\u00a0 She also says: \u201cWhen an emotion is healthy, it arises only when it\u2019s needed, it shifts and changes in response to its environment, and it recedes willingly once it has addressed an issue.\u00a0 When love is healthy, it does none of these things\u2026Love does not increase or decrease in response to its environment, and it does not change with the changing winds.\u201d Love defies categorization.<\/p>

In Hawaiian traditional medicine, love is the state of aloha that Great Spirit demonstrates to us unconditionally\u2013no matter what we do, think, say, or feel.\u00a0 In truth, we are never disconnected from aloha; it is\u00a0we<\/em>\u00a0who isolate from\u00a0it<\/em>.\u00a0 We do this by allowing fearful and worrisome thoughts to take over our mental landscape unresolved.\u00a0 When we do this consistently as a habit, we begin to believe we are unworthy or in need of fixing. Although we cannot really control which thoughts fall into our minds, we can learn to listen to what our emotions are telling us.\u00a0 In this way, we learn how we can reconnect with the Divine moment by moment when we find ourselves going off track.\u00a0<\/p>

This takes practice and rather constant awareness because many of us have the tendency to want to contract and protect ourselves when something challenging happens in life.\u00a0 In Hawaiian traditional medicine, the heart is the gateway in the human body that Spirit sends aloha through.\u00a0 Unless we practice living with open-heartedness, this portal becomes blocked and in some cases, closed, making life feel extremely painful.\u00a0 With willingness and effort, this vortex of light can be cleared wide open.\u00a0 One of my teachers says, \u201cAn open heart is the best defense.\u201d\u00a0 Through experience, I\u2019ve found that to be true.\u00a0 When I am not trying to hide, protect, or defend anything, my heart can stay open to what is happening in the moment.\u00a0 The main way I\u2019ve built resilience inside myself over time is by practicing taking the present moment as it is.\u00a0 Whether I like it or not is irrelevant.<\/p>

\u2026We live in a time when it is acceptable to say: \u201cso and so\u00a0made<\/em>\u00a0me mad;\u201d as if another person had control of our inner state of being!\u00a0 It can be hard to stay neutral when someone is laying into us, mocking us, blaming us, or shaming us.\u00a0 However, just because it\u2019s challenging doesn\u2019t mean it can\u2019t be done.\u00a0 I like to think of healing as a process of learning how to be your own inner cartographer.\u00a0 Every person on earth has a unique inner landscape they live within\u2013whether they are conscious that they are constantly navigating that territory or not.\u00a0 It behooves us to know how we think, what we believe, what we do with our energy, and what patterns we run so that we can shift the ways we live that are not in our best interests.\u00a0 When we know our inner landscape by heart, we are much less likely to be at the effect of someone\u2019s unkind words or actions.\u00a0 We are more likely to see that in a neutral way as a reflection of her inner landscape rather than our own.\u00a0 This doesn\u2019t mean that we won\u2019t be triggered by someone else\u2019s actions or words sometimes but it does mean that we will have the tools to figure out why we were triggered and to set to work to shift what inside of\u00a0us<\/em>\u00a0caused our reaction.<\/p>

The emotions sit\u2026with the waters of life and the plants who give away oxygen and sustenance without asking for anything in return.\u00a0 Like water, we can learn to allow our emotions to flow out of us instead of staying stuck or running out like raging rivers that destroy life.\u00a0<\/p>

Jennifer Engr\u00e1cio<\/strong>\u00a0has been a student of shamanism since 2005. Jennifer is a certified teacher who has worked with children in many different education settings since 2001. She is a certified shamanic coach, reiki master, and lomilomi practitioner; in addition, she runs\u00a0<\/strong>Spiral Dance Shamanics<\/strong><\/a>. Originally from Vancouver, Canada, she now lives in Calgary, Canada with her life partner.<\/strong><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

*The following is an excerpt from the book\u00a0\u201cDreaming of Cupcakes: A Food Addict\u2019s Shamanic Journey into Healing:\u201d We humans spend so much time stuffing, denying, spewing, and avoiding our feelings…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1061,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiraldanceshamanics.com\/beta2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiraldanceshamanics.com\/beta2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiraldanceshamanics.com\/beta2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiraldanceshamanics.com\/beta2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiraldanceshamanics.com\/beta2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1060"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/spiraldanceshamanics.com\/beta2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1063,"href":"https:\/\/spiraldanceshamanics.com\/beta2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1060\/revisions\/1063"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiraldanceshamanics.com\/beta2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiraldanceshamanics.com\/beta2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiraldanceshamanics.com\/beta2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiraldanceshamanics.com\/beta2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}