Emotional Intelligence:
Emotional Healing Is The Key To Real Change
By Jon Terrell, MA
Emotional Intelligence--EQ for short--is the skill to manage emotions in a healthy and productive way. Coined by the psychologist Daniel Goleman, it is about the role that emotions play in our lives. The higher our EQ, the better we can manage our feelings and live our lives more fully and enjoyably.
Developing our EQ is the most important life skill for you to develop. This website is all about EQ, about emotional maturity through transforming stuck feelings, especially anger, fear and grief.
Feelings are what makes life worth living. With a higher Emotional Intelligence you can feel more alive, more loving, more creative and more fulfilled. Rather than being ruled by your moods, caught up in intense reactions when people say things or do things that affect you, you are in charge of your life.
This does not mean you compartmentalize or reduce your feelings. Just the opposite-you learn to embrace uncomfortable feelings, receive their gifts and lift them up.
As you develop your Emotional Intelligence you are able to feel your feelings fully without drowning in them:
• Instead of getting angry or enraged and doing or saying things you later regret you can say "NO" clearly and cleanly to protect yourself and stand up for yourself in life.
• Instead of freezing or running in fear, afraid to speak up or make a decision, you can express your truths with excitement and enthusiasm.
• Instead of being overwhelmed by grief or always being sad you grieve well and develop a loving, joyful heart.
Why Breakthroughs Don't Last
Like many folks, I used to read books and go to workshops and seminars to learn new techniques to break through my problems. I'd leave with more insight and often feel like I had gotten something valuable. But because I wasn't working to improve my Emotional Intelligence, these breakthroughs didn't last. This was frustrating and confusing and I sometimes felt like I was"going around in circles." Now I know that when I feel stuck it means I have emotional work to do, and fortunately I have the keys to do it.
Transforming stuck emotions is the missing link all our efforts to grow, be success and enjoy life.
Changing our ideas and shifting our perspectives, which is where most folks direct their efforts, and what most books and seminars are about, can be helpful, but not nearly as useful.
Free Your Emotions, Free Your Life
If your breakthrough slips away, it was just a "head trip." You had a brilliant insight or "Ah Ha" and then you came back down to where you were before. You didn't really change, just had some mental understanding.
But My Feelings Are So Challenging - Isn't There Another Way?
The work is not about just being angry, or sad or in grief. You've already experienced those feelings. It's about experiencing those feelings rather than suppressing or avoiding them, which only increases your pain. When you embrace these uncomfortable feelings they immediately start to change, revealing their gifts to you..
The key to real change is to be able to shift from avoiding feelings to transforming our feelings.
Feelings contain a huge amount of energy and awareness. When you are stuck in a feeling your awareness and all that energy is caught up in it. Your stuck in a storm.
Transforming the feeling wakes you up so you are more aware and so you have access to all that life energy! Suddenly you can make real changes in your lives. You feel much more alive, awake, free. You experience the gift of each of your feelings and you live in a more spacious, grounded place.
Developing Emotional Intelligence
There are a number of ways to increase your Emotional Intelligence:
- The most direct way I know is through our emotional healing retreats, our Grief and Other Difficult Emotions Retreats. These 3-4 days events give people back their lives. The retreats are designed to help stuck people increase their Emotional Intelligence and live their lives with passion, joy and clarity.
- Practices that develop present moment awareness, such as meditation, can be very helpful by helping you develop more spacious awareness, more room to respond rather than react.
- Massage and Bodywork can be useful to release habitual tension that is one of the components of stuck emotions. Your body holds suppressed emotions inside and these practices can help release those.
- Energy Healing, such as Reiki, can be helpful as well.
- The skill of assertiveness (as opposed to aggressive or passive behavior) is a vital skill to learn to help keep our emotions clear.
- Communication skills such as Non-Violent Communication can be valuable.
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