Joey Klein Of Inner Matrix Systems Explores How You Can Change The World, One Emotion Loop At A Time

 'Tis the season, friends. Allow me to say Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah...and Happy New Year, while I'm at it! We're about to enter the vortex of the holidays and it'll be Valentine's Day before we know it. I love to explore Gratitude as a focus or way of being -- not just in the holiday season, but as a quality to train all year long. One of the most powerful things about Gratitude is the way it leads to truly being present in the moment—the foundation of Mindfulness. The emotional energy of Gratitude drives the mind to focus on what we have, right down to the most basic and simple things. I am alive. I can breathe. I can hear the fly that’s buzzing around the kitchen. I can see the sun glinting off the leaves of the Aspen in the side yard. I have clean water to drink. I have shelter. There are people in my life who care about me, people I love. I have today. I have this moment. 

As these thoughts occur, they fuel an even greater experience of Gratitude and feelings of Abundance. Gratitude and Abundance in turn direct the mind to focus on all that we have and all we can contribute to the lives of others and to the world. Together these emotions and thoughts form a powerful emotion loop, inspiring a set of predictable actions that occur to us to take. We take a deep dive into emotion loops, how to map them out and train them, in our Power Series. But for our purposes here, let’s do the CliffsNotes version:

An emotion loop occurs when an emotion we feel fuels a thought that drives an action, the result of which reinforces the original emotion, and around and around it goes. If we’re not paying attention, it can be easy to fall into emotional loops that, at best, don’t serve us well, and at worst, can be downright destructive. Take someone who’s struggling to maintain a healthy weight, for example. If they’re operating from an emotional space of Unworthiness, it’s going to be a lot harder to do than if they’re operating from a space of, say, Inspiration. Unworthiness creates thoughts like, Who am I kidding? I’m never going to be a swimsuit model and Who’s going to notice anyway?, and thoughts like that make it easy to say, F-it, the gym can wait, I’m having the apple fritter French toast for breakfast.

The problem though, and what makes it so insidious, is that as soon as that sugar bomb of apples and cinnamon and gooey yumminess is in their belly, they’re visited by Unworthiness’s ugly siblings, Guilt and Shame. And then here come thoughts like, Of course I ate that apple fritter French toast because I’m a loser and I don’t deserve to feel good or look good or be anywhere in the vicinity of anything related to the word good. None of that is true of course, that’s just what the mind does. But why would it do that? Why would our own minds work against us? The great irony is that it’s actually a matter of survival.

See, the nervous system’s number one priority is to keep us alive. That means its number one job is to look for threats. But in the modern world it’s perfectly reasonable for people to go years, decades, even a lifetime without finding themselves in a truly life-threatening situation. So what’s a nervous system to do? Well, it’s not going to stop looking for threats because that’s what it does. So then we have to ask, what constitutes a threat? The answer to that might be different for everyone but it lies in the same place: the emotional patterns that have been programmed into the nervous system.

Looking at the example of our French toast eating friend who wants to get into shape but just can’t seem to make it happen, Unworthiness was drilled into the nervous system until it simply became a way of life. And now anything that challenges that unworthiness is interpreted by the nervous system as a threat. So even though logic and reason would tell us that exercising and eating a healthy diet is going to help us live longer, the nervous system isn’t interested in logic and reason. The nervous system is saying, Hey, we’ve been living in this lonely place, feeling sad and sorry for ourselves, and guess what? We’re still alive! For the nervous system, it’s an If it ain’t broke, why fix it? kind of situation. And anything that challenges the status quo is going to be a problem.

In a way, emotion loops serve as a safety blanket for the nervous system. They ensure that we “stay in our lane”, so to speak. So what if we want to do something different? Logic and reason would tell us that, if a particular emotional pattern was programmed into the nervous system at some point, then we should be able to program a new one, right? But remember, the nervous system doesn’t care about logic or reason. We can’t just “decide” to have a new emotional pattern and, bingo-bango, create a new emotion loop. We have to train it. And that, my friends, is what we are here to show you how to do.

Which brings us back to Gratitude and Abundance. Imagine if those were the baseline for your nervous system rather than things like Unworthiness or Anger or Resentment. Imagine what you could create. Let’s say you feel stuck in a place in your career. It can be easy to tell stories about why you’re stuck, whose fault it is, and how you’ll probably never get unstuck. But what if, instead, you started to train the feeling of Gratitude into your nervous system? How might that change the stories bouncing around in your head? How might it change the way you approach work in the first place?

Start by simply acknowledging what you do have rather than focusing on what’s missing. You have a job. You can support yourself. You’re putting a little away each month, building that wealth. You like the people you work with and your boss is a decent guy. I mean, when you start to put it down in black and white, you start to see, hey, things ain’t so bad. Maybe you’re not exactly where you thought you’d be yet, but you’ve got an awful lot to check off in the plus column on your way to that dream job you’ve had your eye on. So just put your focus there. Gratitude for what’s going well. Train it. Drill it. When the old stories start popping up, simply recognize them, acknowledge them, and set them aside. We don’t need them because we got shit to be grateful for.

Over time, with practice and determination, Gratitude will inform a sense of Abundance. Gratitude and Abundance are love-based emotions, and when we operate inside love-based emotions, and we’ve got our sites set on that dream job, we’re able to access Intuition. With Intuition turned on, we’re able to recognize new opportunities and possibilities that we never knew were there. By showing us what’s there rather than what’s missing, Gratitude becomes the foundation for a new emotion loop that serves us rather than hinders us.

This way of being has an impact. Both on ourselves and the people around us. We get to feel these emotions and experience the positive impact on the nervous system. It means better sleep, a stronger immune system, more vibrant relationships. The people in our lives feel loved, seen, valued, connected. They're more likely to be collaborative, supportive, and loving in response. They're also more likely to mirror these emotion loops, paying forward this goodness you set into motion. It's like the butterfly effect; small things can have an exponential impact. Imagine a world where one million people took this on as a way of being. That would look like global impact. 

At IMS, we're here for that. Maybe try it on for size. For one day, maybe just for an hour. See how it feels, see how it goes. Maybe consider training such a loop for a week, a month, the holiday season. See what's possible. And join us at an upcoming Power Series Weekend Intensive. We’ll get you all the tools, techniques, and strategies for training new emotion loops that will align you with the vision for the life you want to create. Click HERE to learn more and sign up today!