[Neurons] 2010 Meta Reflections #55

[L. Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections 2010 – #55

November 15, 2010

 

 

 

META-STATING AND EMOTIONS

Part I

 

 

“I have some questions about the word ‘state’ in NLP and Neuro-Semantics.
I’m confused because it seems to be used in many different ways.  My
question is, ‘Is a state an emotional state?  Or is a state a mental state?
Or is a state a physiological state?  Which is it?”

 

And the answer is, Yes.  At one and the same time, a state is all of these
things.  And this speaks to why we use the word state— it is a systemic term
that combines all of these facets into a single term and so breaks up the
old delusion of the separate words, “mind,” “body,” “emotion,” as if they
referred to isolated entities.

 

Today there’s a lot of research and writing on emotional intelligence.  And
Daniel Goleman uses this phrase to refer to the awareness (detection),
monitoring (observing), managing of emotions, and then using those emotions
to relate to others.  NLP and Neuro-Semantics have been speaking about E.Q.
(Emotional Quotient) since the 1970s as state awareness, eliciting,
monitoring, interrupting, managing, anchoring, etc.

 

And what is an emotion?  Motion!  It is a moving within a person, an
activation within all of the aspects of the brain— the thalamus, associative
and motor cortexes so that somatic (body) energy is generated so that a
person moves out [e(x)-motion] from his or her current experience.  So an
“emotion” is a system function of mind-and-body and that’s why we hyphenate
the full phrase—mind-body-emotion (see Meta Reflection #53).

Neurologically, an emotion is “an action tendency” generated by the
information in our context that activates our motor cortex and other brain
structures (amygdala, thalamus, hypothalamus, adrenal gland, etc.).
Understanding emotions in this way enables us to hold the tension between
several realizations that are simultaneously true.

 

What is an emotion?  It is how you feel your meanings.  The meanings you
create are the meanings that you then feel as “emotions.”  Create ideas,
understandings, beliefs, and meaning frames of joy, delight, and pleasure
and you will be feeling the emotions that correspond to these meanings.  So
with fear and timidity and insecurity—these emotions arise from your beliefs
and understandings about something that you interpret as scary.  Emotions
make sense according to the frames and layers of frames that you have about
things.  Emotions manifest somatically (in your body) the maps you create
about things.

What is an emotion?  It is the difference that you experience between what
you have mapped about things and your experiences of those things.  It is
the map–territory difference.  If the territory is not living up to your
understandings and expectations, then your maps are being violated and when
your maps are being violated— your very sense of the world is in danger.  So
no wonder you feel “negative!”  No wonder you feel threatened at a very
basic (existential) level!  No wonder you feel afraid, angry, sad,
disappointed, frustrated, guilty, bad, etc.  And when the territory is
fulfilling your perceptions and expectations, then your maps are being
confirmed, validated, and proven right.  No wonder you feel pleased,
delighted, happy, content, and “good!”  Everybody in your mind-body-emotion
system says, “You’re on the right track, keep going.”  Conversely, when you
feel the “bad” (the “negative” emotions), everything inside you is
screaming, “Stop, look, listen, change course, something is not right.”

 

In Neuro-Semantics, we illustrate this with a scale.   Using the metaphor of
a scale, we put “map” on one side and “territory” (or your experience in the
territory) on the other side.  As the scale balances out— going up and down,
experience in the territory confirms or disconfirms the map a resulting
emotion occurs.  The emotion provides you information about how you are
doing with your map in the world.  If doing well, it activates your
excitatory nerves so that you continue; if it is not doing well, it
activates your inhibitory nerve impulses so that you slow down or stop to
re-evaluate things.  Then you can change either your map or your experience
(your competence in coping).

 

And there’s more.  That’s not the last word in Neuro-Semantics about
emotions.  The scale metaphor speaks generally to how you and I experience
“positive”and “negative” emotions and directs us to both our mapping about
things and our skills in coping with the territory that we are attempting to
navigate.  Yet there is more.  What is more are the higher frames that you
have about all of this.  What do you believe about your mapping?  What do
you believe about your beliefs, your expectations, your understandings, your
skills, the territory, etc.?

 

So the quality of your emotions, as the difference between mapping and
experiencing, is governed by even higher meta-states (frames of meanings).
Among these I find the following are some of the most important ones to
check on:

1) Demandingness.  How much demandingness do you have in your mapping?  The
more you demand that things have to be the way you want them and expect
them, the more violation you will experience and therefore the more negative
emotions and the more negative the emotions that you experience.

 

2) Appreciation.  How much appreciation do you have for yourself, others,
life, the world, emotions, etc.?  The more you have a frame of appreciation,
the more good feelings you will generate, and the more good feelings you can
generate even for the smallest of blessings, the smallest of delights. 

 

3) Surprise.  What do you believe about being surprised, shocked, unsure,
etc.?  The more you accept and welcome surprises, the more comfortable you
will be with ambiguity, with differences between what you get and what you
expected, and the more you’ll bring a child-like attitude of wonder and
curiosity to things.

 

4) Counting / Discounting.  What do you believe about things counting?  Does
everything count?  Or does nothing except the very best count?  If you tend
to discount, to background everything good except the big thing you are
wanting or working on, you’ll find that very little will excite or motivate
you.

 

5) Habituation.  What do you believe about the things that you are used to?
The more you let things habituate and not keep a “freshness of appreciation”
about them, the more you get “used to your blessings” which Abraham Maslow
said is one of the greatest sources of human evil on the planet.

 

In Neuro-Semantics we focus on all of this in our flagship Training — APG
(Accessing Personal Genius).  It occurs at the beginning of Day 2 and the
reason for that?   Because to access your highest and best (your “personal
genius” or focus state), you have to have a good relationship to your
emotions.  And mostly for those emotions that trouble you, you just need to
meta-state them with acceptance (and I’ll write about that in the next Meta
Reflection). 

 

 

 

 

 

THE NEXT SELF-ACTUALIZATION WORKSHOP --- November 19-21 

 

What:                          Unleashing Vitality

Where:                        Hotel Castello — North Central Italy – 

 
<http://www.hotelcastello.com/home_eng.php>
http://www.hotelcastello.com/home_eng.php                                  

Airport:                        Bologna
<http://www.bologna-airport.it/uk/?LN=UK>
http://www.bologna-airport.it/uk/?LN=UK (18 miles away)

                                    Forlì
<http://www.forliairport.com/main/index.php?id_pag=56>
http://www.forliairport.com/main/index.php?id_pag=56 (21 miles)

Time:                           9 am to 6 pm.

Contact details            Nicola Riva and Lucia Giovannini

                                    mobile: +39 348 5600507 -
<mailto:nicola at blessyou.it> nicola at blessyou.it     

 

 

 

 

NEXT YEAR --- THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL NEURO-SEMANTIC CONFERENCE

            July 1--- 3, 2011

            Grand Junction Colorado

            See www.neurosemantics.com  -- click: Trainings --- then click:
NS Conference    for details

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

L.  Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Neuro-Semantics Executive Director  ----   <http://www.neurosemantics.com/>
www.neurosemantics.com

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO.  81520 USA                             ----
<http://www.self-actualizing.org/> www.self-actualizing.org

1 970-523-7877                                               ----
<http://www.meta-coaching.org/> www.meta-coaching.org

 

     

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Neuro-Semantics, go to the front page of  <http://www.neurosemantics.com/>
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Reflection articles by Dr. Hall are sent out every Monday (Colorado time).
Trainers' Reflections are on Tuesdays and Meta-Coach Reflections on
Wednesdays.   Contact Dr. Hall at  meta at acsol.net  

 

 

 

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