I want you to take a second and name an emotion. Doesn’t matter what it is. Love, serenity, anger, fear, any emotion will do. Bring the emotion to mind and sit in it for a moment. Maybe it’s bringing up experiences in your life that are attached to that emotion. And thinking about those experiences is causing you to have certain thoughts and beliefs around those experiences. Remember, our thoughts and beliefs are inextricably connected to our emotions. Now, this might seem tricky, but imagine you have no language. No words. No ability to express the thoughts and beliefs you’re having around the emotions you are feeling. How would you understand those thoughts and beliefs? In fact, without language, would you even have any thoughts or beliefs at all? Because, what are thoughts and beliefs, really? Just strings of words floating through our head, right? So, if we had no words, it would stand to reason that we would have no thoughts or beliefs. Trippy, I know.
This isn’t just a hypothetical scenario. In fact, it’s how you spent the first years of your life. Before you acquired language, you were a purely emotional being. All you could do was feel. You could express those feelings by crying or laughing or frowning or banging your fists on the tray of your high chair, but you had no way to attach thoughts or beliefs to those feelings because you didn’t have the words with which to create thoughts or beliefs. During those years, your brain spent most of its time in a Delta state, or low frequency brain waves. As adults, we usually only achieve a Delta state during deep sleep. Delta waves are crucial for healing and rejuvenation as well as consolidating memories. So, being in an almost constant Delta state during infancy meant that your unconscious mind acted like a sponge, a fertile field just waiting to be planted. Everything that happened around you was like a seed being planted in your field, and all of those seeds took root and grew.
Until we acquired the use of language, there was no filter called the conscious mind. We could not discern for ourselves. When the seeds of thoughts, beliefs, concepts and emotional frequencies were planted, we simply had to accept and adopt them. We couldn't choose what was occurring and what we were going to accept and what we were not going to accept. Whatever was offered to us, we adopted. This is called conditioning. We were conditioned into a way of thinking, into a way of feeling, into a certain value system. With the development of language, we began to shape our reality around that conditioning. And our reality serves as the filter through which everything that happens in the world is either allowed into our unconscious mind, or is kept out. It's the difference between a thought that we're willing to let go and one that we say, “Oh no, this one is staying, man, I am not going to let this one go.”
The mind uses emotion to validate whether a thought is real or not. Whether it's true or false. Whether it should be let in or kept out. If you have a belief structure or a value system that's really strong for you, the mind is holding onto it simply because it got tied to a very strong emotion. Maybe the emotion is love. Maybe it’s fear or unworthiness. You had a very strong emotional experience, then language created thought and then, boom! It’s glued into the mind. The emotion is the glue that takes a thought, takes the words, takes the story you’ve created, and adheres it into the mind. It’s only when you let go of the emotion, when you dissipate the emotional frequency, that you can let the thought go. It frees the thought. Because a thought is just a series of words that we assign meaning to. They shape our reality, but they are only as strong as the emotion they are tied to. Change the emotion, and you can change the language that creates the thought attached to it.
How do emotions get tied to thoughts in the first place? It starts with an experience. Using our language, we tell the story about that experience as it's occurring. Then we create this thing called a belief or a value system around the experience. Maybe somebody gives me something. They love me. They care for me. I feel loved. I feel cared for. So, I tell the story, “Oh, they love me because they gave me this gift.” Now all of a sudden, I tied the emotion of being loved to the experience of receiving gifts. The belief got tied to the emotion because I had an experience while telling myself a story. It was language that allowed me to shape reality around the emotion. So if I find myself in a relationship with someone who’s not much of a gift giver, I might start thinking this person must not really love me. But if I can recognize that feeling when it presents itself, I can change the emotional frequency and tell myself a new story. “I don’t need Mallory to buy me a set of steak knives to know that she loves me.” (Although a new set of knives would be pretty rad.)
If you would like to dive deeper into the relationship between thoughts and emotions, and how language can shape our reality (because we’ve only just scratched the surface here) I would like to invite you to take a look at our Power Series. Click HERE for more information and sign up for a Power Series Weekend Intensive today!