Your Emotional Power

By Steve Mensing

Are feelings and emotions important? Need we look any further than the shipwrecks of many persons' lives? Who hasn't heard of anxiety, depression, addiction, stress, broken relationships, and failed aspirations?

Avoiding feelings, being unable to feel feelings and express feelings, and having no way to make them less intense, painful, or attention grabbing can create major havoc in our lives. At the heart of anxiety, depression, problematic anger, mind-body illnesses, addictions, severe stress, broken relationships, and failed aspirations is often our inability to feel, accept, express, and decipher our feelings. Next to having food, air, and shelter, feelings are a necessity for survival, health, and well-being. Frequently many of us are inexperienced in the area of feelings and emotions.

In learning to feel our feelings we will be bringing our awareness to our feelings and noting what happens in our inner world. The major challenge facing folks in knowing their feelings is that we simply don't put time aside to experience our inner natures. We may have other responsibilities, work, families, education, relationships, and hobbies. Many of us are externally oriented rather than inner-directed. We miss our interior life because of this and feelings get brushed aside. We often don't become aware of our feelings until the emergency calls us and we start to become conscious of feeling overwhelmed or stressed. Feelings were long ignored and out of awareness. Being unaware of our feelings went on too long. It's usually during crisis when we become aware of our emotions and feelings. Addictions. Anxiety. Depression. Stress related disorders. These painful areas may be our first introductions to our inner world of feelings.

It probably isn't all that important we have scientific sounding names for our feelings. Anxiety and depression can just as well be called feelings or even hurt. What is important is we fully feel our feelings with no intention of getting rid of them or keeping them. When we do this in an attentive and accepting way we get their emotional insights and emotions become less intense, more comfortable, and far less attention grabbing. An emotion that's become less intense, less enduring, less attention grabbing, and more comfortable we call "integrated." When we avoid or suppress feelings, we miss emotional information, become stressed, lose awareness, and can develop stress-related health and emotional problems.

This integration leads to more clearly seeing ourselves, others, and the world without the distortion created by intense and enduring emotions. Feeling and integrating are keys to aliveness and emotional well-being. Feeling and integrating our feelings stands at the middle way between avoiding our feelings and over-identifying with our feelings. Feeling and integrating is basically a non-interfering approach to our feelings. This approach does not judge or evaluate our emotions and feelings. We experience our feelings with acceptance.

Our feelings, emotions, and beliefs require our priority if we wish to live meaningful, stimulating, and enjoyable lives. What stands in the way of feeling feelings? Avoidance. Not putting time aside to be with them. Our attention drifts elsewhere. Not putting feelings on our priority list. Impatience. Denial. Sometimes even believing we're selfish for paying any attention to our inner life. For folks with strong negative self-views, looking inside may ask for courage and patience. It isn't easy being with intense and painful feelings. What my book 'Your Emotional Power' and its methods provide are approaches for emotional exploration and growth that can be accomplished with a minimum of pain and overwhelm.

Book Review by Peter Shepherd
This book is based on the famous Emoclear techniques created by Steve Mensing. Emoclear comes from the words "clear emotions." The simple and powerful processes for clearing unwanted emotions are based on mindfulness, modern exposure methods, and ageless integration techniques made more comfortable. Modern behavioral repatterners and visualization techniques are also included.

So why the need for a book? Your Emotional Power both explains the need for the approach and presents a carefully thought out action plan, with the techniques in their ideal sequence. It also contains the combined wisdom and experience of both Steve and the worldwide Emoclear community. Far more than just presenting the techniques, this book for the first time explains exactly why and how to use them, with a tremendous amount of helpful practical advice. Here is the Table of Contents with some notes...

• Ch. 1, Learning to Feel Your Feelings... extending from the introduction above, Steve offers many tips on the practice of feeling feelings, and explains the underlying principles of healing and emotional integration.
• Ch. 2, Integrating Feelings, Emotions and Sensations... includes the Emotional Integrator and the Heartbeat Integrator processes.
• Ch. 3, The Emotional Writing Process... sometimes called written exposure, emotional writing is a proven method of desensitizing intense emotions so they are no onger distressing.
• Ch. 4, The Event Reviewer... is a written exposure method aimed specifically at traumatic events and phobias.
• Ch. 5, Creating a Preferred Future... includes the Creator and the Goal Maker. The Creator is a super method of envisioning what we want, utilizing Milton Erickson's Miracle Question linked with Chant Visualization. Linking these two methods easily and quickly creates highly believable visualizations. The Goal Maker is a high-powered tool based on studies of what make successful goals fly.
• Ch. 6, Changing Distorted Beliefs... teaches how to spot distorted beliefs, test them, and change them if they prove to be self-defeating or untrue when viewed from an emotional neutral viewpoint.
• Ch. 7, Taking Action... learn action techniques that will help you overcome procrastination and emotional paralysis.
• Ch. 8, Changing Self-Defeating Behavior... this is based on research on how human beings alter behavior and keep it altered. You learn how to use the Behavior Repatterner to unseat the most difficult to change and habitual behavior.
• The Appendices contain tips on anxiety and depression, and some great info about self-acceptance.

You will discover 'Your Emotional Power' by Steve Mensing provides a treasure trove of cutting edge and highly effective methods for mastering even your most powerful and negative emotional states and befriending them. As one lawyer remarked... "I came to a conclusion that was eminently reasonable, totally logical and completely wrong - because while learning to think I almost forgot how to feel." To know ourselves we must pay attention to our feelings and listen to our body so we can be guided and live an authentic life.

I personally endorse this method, which closely corresponds in its underlying theory to my own courses and writing. Emoclear works well in the hands of a therapist but also on one's own: an emotionally stable person could apply these processes, without a practitioner, and they will serve to integrate body and mind in a way that provides a degree of clarity and integrity that is far beyond the normal. This book provides the map and the compass.