Emotional Guidance System: What Your Emotions Are Really Telling You

We all experience a whole range of emotions. Some feel wonderful. Joy, gratitude and love can make life feel easy, while anger, fear, disappointment and grief can sometimes feel overwhelming.

When difficult emotions show up, our instinct is often to try to get rid of them. We might suppress them, distract ourselves, talk ourselves out of them or try to replace them with more positive thoughts. I know I have done all of those things.

But what if our emotions are not actually the problem? What if, instead of something we need to control, they are giving us useful information about how we are seeing and experiencing the world?

This is how I have come to think about our emotions: as an internal guidance system. They can help us recognise when our thinking is taking us further away from peace, and when we are moving back towards it.

What Is the Emotional Guidance System?

The Emotional Guidance System makes most sense when we connect it to the Two Thought Systems. One of the central ideas I learned from A Course in Miracles was that underneath all our complicated thinking lie two very different directions: fear and love. I think of these as the ego and the Higher Self.

When I am thinking with the ego, I am more likely to see through fear, separation, judgement, scarcity or blame. I make things personal, assume the worst, defend myself or decide that somebody has to be wrong for me to be right. That way of seeing takes me further from peace. Higher Self thinking moves in the opposite direction. It looks for love, truth, shared worth and, wherever possible, an outcome that honours everyone involved. Even when the answer is to say no, walk away or take firm action, it does not need somebody else to lose in order for me to feel safe.

This is why I pay attention to my emotions. They can give me an early indication of the direction my thinking is taking. If I am caught in resentment, blame, fear or judgement, I can stop and ask what I am believing about the situation. What have I decided it means? Am I taking it personally, predicting the worst or making somebody else responsible for my sense of worth or safety? Then I can ask the question that has helped me more than almost any other: Is there another way I could see this?

That does not mean every painful emotion is evidence that I am thinking with the ego. Sometimes life simply hurts. Grief, shock, disappointment and fear can be natural responses to what has happened. What I have found useful is to notice what I may be adding to the pain. I can grieve somebody I love without adding guilt, blame or a frightening story about what their loss means for the rest of my life. The Higher Self does not ask me to stop grieving. It gives me another way to hold what has happened.

That is how I use my Emotional Guidance System. My feelings are not a verdict on whether I am doing well or badly, but they can help me notice which thought system I may be listening to. When I lose my peace, I become curious about what I am believing and whether there is a more loving way to see the situation. Sometimes that changes the feeling. Sometimes it leads me to take action, set a boundary or ask for help. And sometimes nothing needs to change except my willingness to let the pain be there without adding another layer of suffering to it.

Your Emotions Are Not Judgements

Before I understood this, I often believed that other people or circumstances were responsible for how I felt. If someone upset me, they had made me feel bad. If something went wrong, the situation was the cause of my distress. I didn’t realise there could be another way of looking at it.

One of the first times I remember consciously using my emotions as information happened many years ago, and it taught me something about myself that I might otherwise never have seen.

From Victim to Learning Opportunity

One day, a very angry woman knocked on my door and accused my children of bullying her child. She threatened me and went on to make some pretty awful judgements about me, my children and where we lived. As it turned out, she had got the wrong people entirely, but I didn’t know that during the encounter.

By the time she left, I was in tears. I felt ashamed and inadequate and, despite not even knowing this woman, somehow felt as though she had demolished my character.

I was beginning to learn about emotions differently at the time, so once I had calmed down, I tried not to concentrate solely on what she had done. Instead, I became curious about why the encounter had affected me so deeply.

What I eventually realised was uncomfortable but incredibly useful. Somewhere inside me, part of me agreed with her.

Her words had touched my own lack of self-worth and some of the negative beliefs I already held about myself. Had I felt completely secure in who I was, her opinion might still have angered or upset me, but it would not have had the power to diminish me in the way it did.

That didn’t make her behaviour acceptable, nor did it make me responsible for it. It simply meant that my reaction had shown me something about myself that I could now begin to heal. Instead of remaining only a victim of a case of mistaken identity, I could use the experience to uncover beliefs I hadn’t fully realised I was carrying. It became one of the early lessons in my own healing.

Pain Is Part of Life; Suffering Doesn’t Have to Be

There is an important distinction here because living from your Higher Self does not mean that you should never experience painful emotions.

Life hurts sometimes. We grieve when someone we love dies. We feel disappointed when something we hoped for doesn’t happen. We can feel frightened when life becomes uncertain and angry when we witness cruelty or injustice. These are human responses, and there is nothing spiritually superior about pretending we don’t have them.

The Emotional Guidance System is not asking us to deny how we feel or immediately turn every painful experience into a lesson. Sometimes we simply need to feel what we feel. This is particularly important with grief, shock and significant loss. There may be no different perspective we are ready for today, next week or even next year. The Higher Self does not demand that we hurry.

But when we are ready, we can gently become curious about the thoughts surrounding our pain. We can ask the question that has helped me so often: Is there another way I could see this?  Pain may be unavoidable. Much of our additional suffering, however, can come from the meaning we attach to what has happened and the story we continue to tell ourselves about it.

From Managing Emotions to Learning From Them

None of this means emotional regulation isn’t important. Sometimes the first thing we need to do is calm ourselves down.

We might need to walk away from an argument, go for a walk, take some slow breaths, sleep on something or simply give ourselves time before responding. When we are in the middle of a strong emotional reaction, trying to analyse it there and then isn’t always helpful.

But once the intensity has passed, there is another question we can ask. Instead of only asking how can I stop feeling this, we can ask what is this feeling showing me? That small change can turn an uncomfortable emotion into an opportunity for greater self-awareness.

It is important, though, that we don’t turn this into another form of judgement. There isn’t a universal dictionary that tells us what every emotion means. Two people can experience the same emotion for entirely different reasons. The purpose is not to diagnose ourselves or anyone else. It is to become curious enough to uncover our own thoughts, beliefs and interpretations.

That was what happened after the encounter with the woman at my door. Before I understood my Emotional Guidance System, I would probably have dealt with my distress by making her entirely responsible for it. And given her behaviour, I would have had plenty of evidence to support my case!

Blaming her might even have made me feel better temporarily. But I would have missed what the experience was showing me about myself. Once I treated my feelings as information rather than something she had done to me, I had a choice about what to do with that information.

What We Learn From Positive Emotions

Positive emotions give us information too. I don’t think alignment with the Higher Self necessarily feels like permanent happiness or great excitement. More often, in my experience, it feels quieter than that. It feels like peace, acceptance, compassion, gratitude, clarity or trust. Sometimes nothing outside us has changed at all.

The situation is the same. The other person is the same. The past certainly hasn’t changed. But something in the way we are seeing it has shifted, and we feel differently as a result. I have come to recognise those moments as important. They show me what happens when I loosen my grip on fear, judgement or the need for things to be different before I can be at peace.

What Changes When You Start Listening

As we begin to work with our emotions rather than against them, several things start to change.

We blame other people less. This doesn’t mean pretending that other people’s behaviour doesn’t affect us. Of course it does. But we begin to recognise the difference between what somebody else has done and the meaning we are giving to it. That gives us far more choice about what happens next. We become curious instead of immediately reactive.

Rather than defending ourselves, retaliating or deciding we already know what something means, we can pause. We begin to notice the beliefs, assumptions and stories underneath our reactions. Once we can see them, we have a much better chance of choosing differently. We begin to see life as a learning experience. Instead of only asking Why is this happening to me, we can sometimes ask What is this helping me to see?

Not every experience needs to become a lesson immediately. But over time, this way of looking at life can change our relationship with both the good times and the difficult ones.

Your Emotions Are Your Guidance System

Throughout this series, I have described life as Earth School: a place where our experiences give us opportunities to grow in awareness and make different choices. Our emotions are an important part of that learning.

The ego thought system takes us towards fear, separation, judgement and conflict. The Higher Self leads us towards love, understanding, connection and peace. Our emotions can help us notice the direction our thinking is taking. When we realise we have gone down the road of fear again, as we all will, there is no need for guilt or self-judgement. We simply have another opportunity to choose.

Sometimes an emotion tells us that something hurts and needs to be felt. Sometimes it reveals a belief we didn’t know we held. Sometimes it shows us that we have become caught in fear, judgement or an imagined future. And sometimes the peace we feel tells us that we have found a way of seeing something that is kinder to ourselves and everyone involved.

Life will still bring pain. We will still get angry, frightened, disappointed and sad. The aim isn’t to become someone who never feels those things. The difference is that we can listen to what we feel without immediately being ruled by it. And when we are ready, we can ask what our emotions are showing us and whether there is another way to see ourselves, another person or the situation.

That is when our emotions stop being something we simply manage and become one of the ways we find our way back to the Higher Self.

Pain may be unavoidable. Much of our additional suffering, however, can come from the meaning we attach to what has happened

Our emotional guidance system only makes sense when we are able to find the thought beneath the feeling, and this is where we go next.

Continue Exploring

Living From Your Higher Self is a journey of understanding and practice. These ten articles are designed to be read in any order, but together they provide a complete framework for living with greater peace, purpose and self-awareness.

Articles in Emotional Guidance System

Emotional Guidance System: What Your Emotions Are Really Telling You

• How to Find the Thought Behind the Feeling
• How to Use Your Emotional Guidance System

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