Emotions are part of us. Often forgotten, they play an immense role in our bodies, our minds, and our life. They perform important functions and are really necessary, even if they can sometimes be very painful. Think of your emotions as another sense, just like your vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, because they provide information like any of these other senses. Here are some of the roles your emotions play:
1) Motivation – Certain emotions encourage action. For example, anger occurs when something happens that you don’t like, motivating you to take action to change the situation.
2) Information – Emotions provide you with information about a situation that you want to modify in one way or another in order to better adapt it to your needs.
3) Communication – Emotions help you communicate more effectively with others. First, because of the universal facial expressions and body language associated with emotions, we instinctively recognize these emotions in others. When someone recognizes how you feel (or recognizes what someone else feels), that person can empathize with you and act appropriately emotionally.
The advantage of basic emotions is that they are universal. A smile will have the same meaning in Europe as in Asia or America because it is the same areas of the brain that are affected. When an emotion gets triggered it can incite:
- facial expressions,
- redness or paleness of the skin and face,
- laughter, tears, cries, retention,
- a change in voice,
- an attitude of fight, flight, freezing, or submission,
- a change in respiratory and heart rhythms,
- salivation or dry mouth,
- dilation or tightening of the pupils,
- hair straightening.
Several psychologists have looked into this aspect of our personality and have been able to define 6 primary emotions, which everyone around the world can feel. Besides the primary emotions, we also have secondary and social emotions. All too often in our society, certain paradigms ask us, human beings, to become robots and to cut us off from our emotions, when on the contrary, it is completely in our nature to feel them and above all, to express them.
There are numerous, often complex, studies, and theories about emotions. In the IP philosophy, we don’t seek academic completeness, we seek very practical and accessible tools to integrate emotions. There are also popular approaches to manage emotions under the label Emotional intelligence (EI). EI is the capability of individuals to recognize their own emotions and those of others, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior, and manage and/or adjust emotions to adapt to environments or achieve one’s goal(s).
There are similarities between the IP emotional integration (EIIP) and the EI approach yet there is also a fundamental difference. Where EI seeks to control and manage emotions, does EIIP rather seek to liberate and integrate emotions. Where in EI aims for the control of the strategic mind over emotions, does EIIP seeks to liberate the constructive information and energizing power of emotions and then integrate them under the guidance of the Higher Self.
There are three main IP tools for emotional integration.