“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:37-39 NIV

Welcome to Season 6 of the podcast! This season is focused on helping you revitalize your relationships. With an eye to the Jesus’ command, we will endeavor to enhance all of our relationships (with God, self, and others).

But before we jump into the topic of relational health, we need to get squared away with our emotional health first. How we manage our emotions greatly impacts our effectiveness in all of these relationships.

So we are kicking of Season 6 with two episodes devoted to helping you understand your feelings and how to exercise your God-given authority over them.

ABOUT THESE SHOW NOTES

Since I know there may be times when you would prefer to read the content rather than listen, I’ve provided text below. It is not an exact transcript but it provides you the essentials.

And time codes for the audio are in the brackets so you can jump to a particular spot if you want to review something specific.

Can You Identify What You Are Feeling?

[0:57]

What emotion are you experiencing right now?

If you’re like many of my clients, you struggle with being able to identify what you are feeling.  And that is problematic if you want to live effectively and intentionally.

We ignore our emotions at our peril. Far from some fluffy, inconsequential thing, our emotions reveal our true thoughts and beliefs and they drive our actions and therefore the results we get our lives.

If you want to know what someone believes, look at the actions they take in their life. And look at the fruit, or cumulative result of those actions.  And if you’ve been listening to the podcast for the past season or so, you know that what we think about our circumstances creates our feelings and our feelings drive our actions and those actions combine to create our results. And that result is going to be a reflection of or evidence for that thought that started the whole process.

Feelings Are Indicators and Drivers

[2:50]

Emotions are both indicators and drivers. They indicate what thoughts we are thinking and they drive the actions we will take.

Today we’re going to take a look at what the Bible says about our emotions and the importance of our ability to exercise appropriate awareness of and authority over our emotions.

I’m going to give you simple yet very effective way to increase your awareness of what you are feeling and the thoughts you’re thinking that are creating your emotional experience.

When you implement this process, you’ll also be able to heighten your ability to see the connection between your feelings and the actions you take and the results those actions create.

SoulSpa Sister Spotlight

Before we jump in to our topic for today, I want to spotlight one of my coaching clients. This is the review Takara Bullock provided after her first session:

Well, thank you Takara for taking the time to share those kind words with me. I appreciate you letting me know how our session together positively impacted you.

If you would like to possibly be featured in an upcoming SoulSpa Sister Spotlight on the podcast simply share with me how you’re using what you hear in the podcast or any of the free resources on the website, our Facebook page or in our Facebook group. I would love to hear your feedback. You can post your review of the podcast on iTunes. And if you’re not sure how, I’ve got a step-by-step tutorial for you. Just click this link to access the tutorial.

Or, click here and leave a review on the Agape SoulSpa FB page or drop me an email at laura@agapesoulspa.com.

Okay, let’s dive into our topic for the day…

Emotions Motivate You to Move

[6:53]

God blesses us and calls us to use our blessings to bless others. We are called first to relationship with God and then to make an impact on the world in a way that serves others and reflects God to others.

Paul put it like this in Ephesians 2:8-10

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

So what is it that drives us out into the world to do those good works?

Emotions, my friend.

Our feelings motivate our actions. In fact, the words emotion and motive share the same Latin root which means to move. Literally, our emotions move us to action.

Neuroscience Is Catching Up to Biblical Wisdom

[8:20]

I’ve been totally geeking out on learning neuroscience during my coach certification. And I tell you, the more I’ve studied the interdependence of our thoughts, feelings and actions and the extraordinarily  intricate connections between our brain, mind and body, the more in awe I have become of our Creator.

When we think a thought in our mind, it actually creates matter in our brains in the form of proteins and neurotransmitters.

These chemical substances literally cause our cells to vibrate as they move through and are metabolized by our bodies.

And this physiological reaction taking place in our bodies is what we experience as emotions.

Why What You Feel Matters

[9:25]

If you want to maximize your health and effectiveness, learn to take  your thoughts captive and harness the power of your emotions.

Studies show that the thoughts and the feelings they create matter a great deal.

Thoughts and Emotions Change Our DNA

In fact research on the effects of stress found that thinking and feeling anger, fear, and frustration caused DNA to change shape and reduce the quality of the DNA. The DNA changes were reversed by feelings of love, joy, appreciation and gratitude.

Other research shows that 75% to 98% of mental, physical and behavioral illness comes from one’s thought life which directly impacts one’s emotional life.

Emotions can make us sick or help us heal.

Emotions can propel us forward in obedience to God’s purpose and will or can hamstring us and make us ineffective in carrying out our calling and purpose to be a blessing, make an impact, and glorify God with our lives.

They are powerful engines and we do well to understand what we are feeling and why and what effect those feelings have on us.

Emotions Don’t Happen To You

[11:54]

So many of us were brought up to think that emotions just happen to us and are a product of our circumstances. We (wrongly) attribute our emotions to what other people think or do. Or to what happens to us or in the environment in which we function.

We say things like:

• My job stresses me out.
• My husband makes me feel insignificant.
• My kids frustrate me.

But in truth, the job, the husband, and the kids have zero ability to create your emotions. You create your emotions with the thoughts you think.

What The Bible Says About Emotions

[12:45]

Since you are the creator of your emotions, God holds each one of us accountable for our own emotions and the actions we take which are driven by them.

You can see examples throughout Scripture where God commands us to exercise authority / control over our emotions.

And in virtually every place the Scripture speaks of emotions it will also mention thoughts and or actions.

It make sense to discuss our responsibility for our thoughts and actions alongside our emotions because the thought creates the emotion and the emotion then drives the actions we take when in that emotional state.

Let me run through some examples of God’s commands with regard to emotions. If you want to read the passage in context (which I always highly recommend), just click on the Scripture and it will open in BibleGateway.com.

Okay, here is just a tiny sampling of Scriptures about us managing our emotions

• God commands us to rejoice and be glad (Ps 100:2; Rom 12:15; Phil 4:4; 1 Thess 5:16),
• to fear [revere] Him (Luke 12:5; Rom 11:20; 1 Pet 1:17),
• to not fear people (Josh 1:9; Deut 31:6,8)
• To not fear persecution (Luke 12:4-5)
• To not worry about circumstances (Matt 6: 25-34; Mark 4:40),
• to grieve and mourn with others (Rom 12:15; John 11:35)
• to grieve and mourn over our sin (Ps. 51:17, James 4:9),
• to let peace rule in our hearts (Col 3:15),
• to be kind and tenderhearted and compassionate toward others (Eph 4:32; Col 3:12-14)
• to hate evil (Ps. 97:10; Amos 5:15) but not to hate our brother (Lev 19:17; 1 John 2:9,11, 3:15).

Clearly God expects us to exercise authority over our emotions so that we can properly relate to Him and to other people and so we can live effectively, bearing much fruit and glorifying God.

How Do We Manage Our Emotions?

[17:50]

So, how do we learn to become more aware of what we are feeling and why we are experiencing that emotion?

First, it helps to understand some basics about what emotions are and have some vocabulary with which to describe these feelings.

What Emotions Are

[18:04]

When our mind thinks a thought about our circumstances, the brain activates physiological responses in the various systems of our body. For example, our heart may beat more rapidly,  our breathing may get more shallow, or our blood pressure may rise or fall.

Different organs of the human body produce different resonance frequencies or vibrations. Scientists from the National Research Nuclear University and collaborators have used a highly sensitive laser device to register these infrasonic vibrations and found it was possible to judge the human emotional state via the amplitude frequency response of these waves.

These vibrations are what we feel in our bodies as emotions.

So learning to recognize what you are feeling and where in your body your are experiencing it, is the first step to learning to be aware of and process your emotions.

Emotions Versus Sensations

[19:39]

Both sensations and emotions drive actions. They feel similar but it’s important to be able to distinguish between the two.

Sensations which start in the body and travel to our brains and bring our conscious attention to something happening in our body that we should be aware of.

For example, if my hand touches the burner on my stove, the nerve endings on my hand will send signals to my brain which will then form a thought in my mind telling me to move my hand because of the pain. Pain is the sensation.

Emotions, begin in the mind with a thought about our external circumstances and then travel into our body where they are felt.

When I see my toddler reach up toward the stove, I feel the emotion of fear because I’m thinking the thought, “That stove is hot and she is going to get burned if she touches it.”

See the difference?

Using This Info To Increase Your Quality of Life

[21:30]

Now that you know what you’re looking for, you can begin to create your own “feelings dictionary” and begin to get some authority over your emotions. This is the first step toward harnessing the power of your emotions to dramatically improve your life.

Naming Your Emotions

[21:38]

As you observe what you experience in your body, you can assign a name to the physiological feeling. Naming what you are feeling is an act of taking authority over it.

In the Bible, whenever someone names someone or something else, they are demonstrating their authority over the thing being named.

Think about when God wrestled with Jacob and at the end of the night of wrestling, God said to Jacob, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel,because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.” You can read that story in Genesis 32:22-32.

I tell you that to draw your attention to the power you will get in being able to observe what you are feeling and give it a name.

Freedom From the Tyranny of Anxiety

[23:00]

I’ve talked previously on the podcast about how powerful it was when I flew to San Diego last August and I was able to get very familiar with what anxiety feels like in my body.

Because I practiced observing the feeling and seeing the connection between the emotional experience and the thoughts that caused it and the actions driven by it, I got to where I can quickly recognize it.

When my chest feels very tight, my breathing gets shallow, my head feels like it’s in a vise, my focus gets very tunnel-visioned, and my stomach feels very buzzy, I’m experiencing anxiety.

This practiced awareness has equipped me to catch myself early in the process of thinking anxiety creating thoughts and check myself and decide of those thoughts are serving me. I can decide if they necessary or if I am just indulging in worry.

This ability to nip those anxious thoughts in the bud has really changed the quality of my life. I’m able to have a much more productive and pleasant day and get more useful things done because I’ve recognized the anxiety and taken captive the thoughts producing it.

And that is what I want for you my friend. I want you to increase your awareness of your emotional state and identify the thoughts causing the feeling and the actions that feeling drives.

Begin Increasing Your Quality of Life Today!

This free download will help you heighten your awareness of your emotions so you can begin to harness their power.

I’ve made you a little exercise that will guide you through observing your feelings and increasing your awareness around the thoughts creating the feeling and the actions driven by it.

Use this to help you begin to create your own unique feelings dictionary. It will be hugely helpful in implementing what I’ll be teaching you in the next few episodes!

You can grab your free gift by clicking here or on the image below.

And I would love to hear your ah-ha moments and discoveries you make as you use this exercise to increase your awareness of your feelings.

Opportunities To Interact

 Join me Friday at 11 am Central Time in The Oasis for our weekly Facebook Live Q & A or on Monday for the Coach’s Corner FB Live at 9:30 am Central on the public Agape Soul Spa FB page.

We will dive a little deeper into some more aspects of this topic of how to process our emotions and you can ask me questions and share what you learn about yourself from doing the exercise in the free download.

Next Week: Harness the Power of Your Emotions

In next week’s episode I’ll help you harness the power of your emotions so you can get the results you want to get in your life. Do you want to lean in to your God-given purpose? Do you want to take actions that bear much fruit (John 15)? Then you won’t want to miss next week’s episode.

Do the exercise in today’s free download and have those results handy when you listen to next week’s episode.

I’ll show you how processing and managing your emotions can dramatically impact how you show up in the world and bless and serve others. And you’ll see how you can use what you’ve learned to level up your own quality of life emotionally.

When you can exercise authority over your emotions, you will dramatically affect the results you can achieve. So be sure and subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss it!

Subscribe & Review

Are you subscribed to my podcast? If you’re not, I want to encourage you to do that today. I don’t want you to miss an episode. I’ll be publishing bonus episodes from time to time and if you’re not subscribed there’s a good chance you’ll miss out on those. Click here to subscribe!

And if you feel like showing me a little love, I would be really grateful if you left me a review over on iTunes (this is where I pick my Listener Spotlight reviews) or in whatever app you listen in. Not sure how? Click here and I’ll walk you through it step by step!