198 Who Do You Think You Are?
teaching about how to inquire about and live in joyous alignment with
our chosen life purpose.
It had become quite clear that I couldn’t complete seminary with
integrity because the church and I just didn’t see eye to eye on the subject
of emotions. They tried to suggest that some emotions, like love, were
okay to have, while others like anger, were not. I figured that if God had
designed the human body with emotions, they must all be important.
Not some more than others. In fact, I was quite clear that my emotions
were some sort of feedback system for spiritual growth. I thought that
since spiritual growth was God’s intention for me, I had better let go of
my attachment to being a minister. I had better just trust that come
Judgment Day, God would understand my decision.
Fast-forward twenty years and I’m listening to a tape my brother
was playing by Esther Hicks on the subject of attraction and manifestation.
Bear in mind that after leaving seminary, I had spent a good portion of
the subsequent 20 years of my life as a counselor and psychiatric social
worker continuing to obsess on the nature of emotions. I heard Esther
say something quite extraordinary that blew my socks off. It was so deeply
aligned with most of what I had learned in the field of psychology and
yet so new and revolutionary and simple and obvious that I was rendered
stunned and speechless. It was such a powerful revelation, that I can
remember exactly where I was the moment I heard it. In fact, it may be
the most valuable thing I’ve ever learned in my life.
What Esther said was this: our emotions are indicators of whether
our thoughts are aligned with our desires. The feeling of joy is a physical
message letting us know that the thought we just had was aligned with
our desires (e.g., a thought of gratitude); when we feel emotional pain,
it’s a wake up event letting us know that we just had a thought that is not
aligned (e.g., a judgment of others or ourselves).
In other words, our emotions simply report to us the content of
our most powerful thoughts. They neither tell us what to do, nor if our
thoughts are good or bad (something that I used to believe). They don’t
tell us if our judgment of someone or ourselves is right or wrong either
(something I also used to think). They simply awaken us from our
obsessively mentally focused lives to tell us to pay attention to the last
thought we had so that we may choose to generate more of those thoughts
(e.g. of appreciation) or less of them (e.g., negative judgments or painful
past or future thinking). That’s it. Our emotions are simply an impartial
indicator and wake-up call about our thought-desire alignment. Our bodies
have been telling us all along that having thoughts of love and appreciation