Emotional MaturityEmotional maturity requires a lot of self-awareness but how many of us stop to consider the impact our feelings have on our ability to create the life that we dream of? If we are trying to live a life of our dreams and be in a happy state most of the time, how can we achieve this when some days we feel angry, some days we feel sad, some days we are nostalgic, some days we feel loved and appreciated and yet on other days we feel isolated and lonely?
Feelings are a natural part of our human existence and the higher vibrating feelings of love and kindness is what separates us from the animal kingdom but we of course still have within us the base emotions such as the need for procreation, the hunger for food and competitiveness for survival. All emotions originate from within what I like to call the ‘subconscious body mind’ which is the animalistic part of our being and can also be likened to a five year old child or ‘the inner child’. Most animals and five year old children are very selfish by nature as they are only concerned about their own desires and wellbeing with little or no regard to what others may want. Think of the family dog for instance, he wants to be fed, he wants to be walked and he wants lots of loving attention, he always ‘wants’ from you and he stares at you while you eat that beautiful succulent roasted chicken and after you tell him to go and sit on his bed he obeys and looks so cute and then he gets his piece of chicken. We have all seen the child that yells and screams in the supermarket until his suffering mother gives in and buys that piece of candy or that action toy. Animals and children are very good at emotional manipulation to get what it is they desire even though they lack maturity. As we mature past childhood, through our teens and in to adulthood our ‘childish’ manipulations no longer work for us although some of us still try to use these methods to get what we want. Rarely do these tactics work as adults and when they don’t work we fall in to further childish behaviour by throwing temper tantrums or as an adult would say we become angry or frustrated. If we are going to be able to manifest the life of our dreams we had better snap out of this childish behaviour quickly and become ‘adults’.
Maturing Becoming emotionally mature does not mean that we ignore our emotions and live in a kind of zombie land pretending that we feel nothing. It means to be able to recognise the emotions that well up from within us and then direct those feelings intelligently toward the greater good for all concerned.
There are many human emotions that we can experience but when you break them down to their bare essence they are formed out of the two basic emotions of love and fear. From ‘love’ stems the noble emotions of kindness, charity, joy and happiness and from fear comes the destructive culprits of greed, anger, frustration and depression and the list could go on ad infinitum. Where do destructive emotions come from? If we are able to locate their source then we have a good chance of either being able to prevent them from arising in the first place or when they do arise directing them into a more productive outlet rather than simply adding to what already may be a tense situation. All of our negative emotional states arise from ‘desire’ which by definition means ‘a longing or hope for’. Desire for something stems from feeling a lack within oneself. That we are not good enough as we are and that we need to fill some kind of void within us with something from outside ourselves in order for us to feel more whole. Our desires may be for a new car, a lover, a child, a Prada handbag or an exotic holiday which are going to make us ‘happy’. These desires are setting us up for a fall and seldom do we see it coming. For example, we may desire to have a beautiful partner to make us happy but what happens is emotion of desire pushes the object we so desperately want away from us. It works in line with the Law of Attraction because ‘like attracts like’ or put another way ‘birds of the same feather do flock together’. When we desire something we do so because we feel emotionally that we are lacking something. When we feel we are lacking we broadcast to the universe this feeling of lack and guess what? What we receive in return is more of what we put out there i.e. more lack! Have you ever been in a situation where you have not been in a loving relationship for some time and no one of the opposite sex would pay attention to you no matter how hard you tried to ‘meet someone’ then all of a sudden you find yourself in a relationship and suddenly you are attracting attention from those very people who never used to pay you attention? Why does it happen like this? Never forget that like attracts like. When we find ourselves in a relationship in which we are feeling loved. We are now broadcasting to the universe a feeling of love and guess what you get in return? More loving attention from others! Life becomes easy when you understand how things work in this universe. You always get back what you give. If you want good friends, you must first be a good friend. If you want material prosperity you must ‘feel’ as if you already had material prosperity. If you want to be loved, you must first find that love within yourself and so on. Like attracts like; if you are feeling a lack and you desperately desire to have a partner and you do happen to attract a partner you will find that that partner you attract is also feeling a lack inside and soon after the infatuation ‘honeymoon’ is over you will start fighting each other for love and fulfilment that you were both seeking from each other in the first place. Be very careful of what you are broadcasting when you enter in to a new relationship. If you really would like a mutual loving relationship you must broadcast to the universe that you feel whole and complete even without a partner so that the person you do attract is also very full within themselves and able to give to you without having to fight you in order to get “love’. Now understanding that it is ‘desire’ or a feeling of not being complete that causes us to look for things outside of ourselves to fill that ‘hole’ within, it will be easier to understand how desire becomes the root of all our negative emotions. What happens if we meet a person who we think can make us happy and that person becomes interested in one of our friends and starts dating them and not us? We get angry, we start asking ourselves ‘what is wrong with me?’ Why don’t they like me? And this kind of thing can lead into depressive states and the feeling of being victimised, “It’s just not fair” and “why can’t that person be with me?” What if we are working really hard in our job and putting in consistent overtime because we desperately want that promotion which will give us a raise in income and make us happy but someone who we know doesn’t work as hard as us gets the promotion ahead of us. We get angry and frustrated. “Can’t they see how good I am?” “Can’t they see how much effort I have been putting in?” In this scenario, you are putting out and broadcasting to the universe that you are not good enough for that promotion because you have to work so hard for it rather than just believing that you simply already ‘deserve’ that promotion. The internal difference is subtle by the outward manifestation is enormous. In order to have mature control over our ‘negative’ emotions we must first be able to rise above the desire that has caused them to rise in the first place by understanding on a deep level that nothing outside of us can makes us happy. Now, let’s take a look at two of the finer human emotions that separate us from the animal kingdom and how we ought to use these feelings in our day to day lives.
Love As humans one of the highest needs is to love and to feel loved. But when we think of love we often conjure up images of romance and being with our soul mate walking hand in hand along a deserted tropical beach, sipping cocktails while staring in to each other’s eyes and thinking “now I have my loved one I am complete”. But is this really true love? This scenario does have aspects of true love such as the feelings of fondness for another but most of what we have been taught about love comes from this ‘Hollywood’ idea of ‘romance’ and is very limited to say the least. Is life really like a Hollywood movie? Of course not and the film makers know this. They prey on the individual’s egocentric feeling of a lack of love and exacerbate their yearning for love by portraying unrealistic expectations of finding ‘the one’ who is going to make us happy. Believing what we see in the movies and read in books about ‘love’ does nothing other than put us on a rollercoaster emotional ride that never seems to end. It’s time to get serious. As if someone else can really make us happy! Humans are emotional and changeable and by this definition no one outside of ourselves can make us truly happy.
True happiness comes from a deep knowing that we are whole and complete just as we are with no desires and no expectations.
Unfortunately our society has conditioned us to believe that things outside of ourselves such as the perfect ‘soul mate’, a bigger house, a new car etcetera will make us happy. But the only way to be truly happy is to find that place of pure contentment within oneself. Anyway, back to love. The example above of finding the perfect soul mate does have aspects of true love but because we see them as ‘my’ soul mate this so called love becomes a form of personal attachment, not true love. When we see our partner that we ‘love so much’ talking and laughing with some one of the opposite sex we get jealous and angry because they are not paying us the same attention and we are scared that they may find the other person more interesting than us and leave us. This form of abandonment fear occurs when we haven’t matured emotionally past a five-year-old’s need for our parents to feed, clothe and provide shelter for us. As an adult we are still looking for our husband, wife or partner (father or mother figures) to look after us and make us happy and when we see that our partner is able to connect with others we become fearful that we may lose our ‘love’. Inversely, when we feel whole within ourselves and become the embodiment of love there is no space for such childish behaviour.
Our attachment to our partner can not only have a detrimental effect on the way we view ourselves but also impact on the way we judge and treat others.
This emotion is a form of hatred. Therefore by ‘loving’ and being ‘attached’ to our object of love we actually create within us the emotions of fear and hate. We are fearful of losing our love and we create aversions to those who don’t meet the standards that we desire. We can only experience true love when we feel at one with the world and a unity with all our fellow beings, animals and nature recognising that all the diverse personalities in our world are just different representations of ourselves. When we judge something, be it good or bad, we separate ourselves from that which we judge and this separation from the whole means that we are lacking love. The emotion of true love spontaneously occurs from within us when there is an absence of judgement therefore if we want to love and feel loved we must discard the childish egocentric habit of judging others. True love is found in the oneness, unity and wholeness, understanding that everyone and everything is perfect as it is and to allow everything to just ‘be’!
Kindness Kindness is the emotion of tenderness and fondness for someone or something and may manifest in the form of lending ten dollars to an elderly person who cannot afford the groceries that they have brought to the checkout. It may be assisting an animal that has been struck by a car and needs medical assistance.
The above are the obvious manifestations of kindness however kindness can also be shown in actions or words that on the surface appear to be quite hurtful. The old saying that ‘sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind’ is very much the truth. A number of years ago I was dating a girl who was very intelligent but very childlike in her demeanour. She got along really well with children and animals but struggled when it came to relating to adults and I always felt quite awkward taking her to events where we would have to converse with adults. Her emotional immaturity came from the fact that her parents had always been there to help her no matter the circumstances and she never really had to do anything for herself. They would give her money whenever she needed it which was often and they even owned a number of houses that would become hers when she was ready. Her parents didn’t realise that their behaviour was keeping her in a childish ‘holding’ pattern and she never had to grow up. The constant pampering from her parents that continued in to her early thirties when I met her held her back in becoming emotionally mature and this had a detrimental effect on my relationship with her because she looked to me to play that same parent role and therefore the relationship was always uneven. When things did not go the way she wanted she would embrace a childish ‘victim’ demeanour and “poor me” attitude until she was able to get her own way, which of course being with me was never going to happen. When I finally came to the realisation that the relationship was never going to be an even partnership between two mature adults and I was forced to break off the relationship even though I loved her and she loved me. While I knew this would hurt her initially, I also knew that if she learnt to stand on her own two feet instead of relying on someone else to hold her up, her self-esteem would grow and she would become a much more whole person, not a child trapped in an adult’s body as I felt she had become. I saw breaking the relationship as an act of kindness and of course she saw it otherwise and fell into a depression and even developed an eating disorder soon after the split. But after about eight months I heard that she had landed herself a good job and that she was in demand from admiring males. Kindness does not come from the act itself but the result of the action that is taken regardless of whether the initial act is seen as being kind or unkind. So what does it mean to be
Emotionally Mature?
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