Step

2

Made the decision to stay in an UpSpiral 

regardless of events outside of us.

We treat emotions only as if they were responses to some affect. Emotions seem always to have a “why” or a “cause,” if only we can locate what that is, because there are many times that we don’t know the origin of why we feel like we feel. There are times when we are aware that “this or that” caused the emotions we feel. And very often we are sure that “someone” else caused us to feel like we feel. While we are the cause of our emotions, it is just as true that long existing emotional patterns are hard to control.  Memories that are implicit, or prior to our actually remembering, cause deep-seated emotional reactions.  However, the answer to managing emotions may be much easier than we expected. Instead of undoing negative emotions and their patterns, we are going to focus here only on building positive emotions. We do not ignore negative emotions, but we just don’t choose to live there.

Here we want to reverse the cause and effect of positive emotions. We treat positive emotions as though they are the rewards or the outcomes of living in some sort of way. Something will make us grateful, an event will give us joy, a relationship will give us love, a goal will give us hope, and a pill will give us some peace. Positive emotions are treated as though they are the results of things on the outside, happening to us in a certain kind of way, and when the stars line up, or our problems get solved, or people line up in a certain way, then the result will be our joy or our gratitude.  Positive emotions are often results oriented, and we get to have them when something happens on the outside of us that creates that response in us. What underlies all of this is that you have to have a reason to feel positive emotions, and that reason is almost always on the outside of us.

How about this?  Feel the feelings of love, peace, gratitude, joy, and hope by choice, for no reason, whenever you want to!  There is no reason to rely on outside forces to give you these experiences. You may wait a long time before something comes along and makes you feel joy. Feel joy, just because you can, whenever you want to. You can feel all of these feelings instantly, for as long as you want, as intensely as you would like. It just takes some practice and the choice not to live your life directed by outside events.

The response might be that outside events can be very significant and some are very negatively impacting. That’s true, some are, but all of them are not. And even for those that are, you will learn that managing your emotional responses and building up a reservoir will make you much more capable of handling outside events. 

The key to being able to do this really lies in where you spend the majority of your time-- in an UpSpiral or a DownSpiral, or waffling back and forth in between the two. Learning to live in an UpSpiral of positivity greatly enhances your ability to experience positivity, and positive emotions greatly increase the probability that you will play less to outside events as the “cause” of your feelings.  In an UpSpiral, there is a much greater probability that you will feel the positive emotions that you choose to feel.

What is an UpSpiral?  An UpSpiral is a term that describes ascending and increasing positive emotion that has an energy, and that energy is always increasing. Once you are in the spiral, you can go higher and higher. The top of the spiral is “feeling good.” It is simply feeling good. You can go higher in the spiral to states of bliss and ecstasy, but that is not our goal.  The UpSpiral is characterized by increasingly better positive emotions that lead to a stable sense of “feeling good.”  The energy of the UpSpiral is one that increases health, problem-solving ability, life-satisfaction, well-being, attention, creativity, and intuition. It is a place of optimism and hope