“I feel your pain…”

President Bill Clinton 

Symbols and Color

• Fireman’s Helmet: Server Set
• Person in Concentric Circles: Centers Group
• Penny: Ordinal – Personal
• Broken Heart: Inspiration Set Symbol reversed to show that sentimentality is often an effect of grief or pain from some past event still influencing
  the person in the present. (see Card 70 – Time).
• Border Color: Green – Server Set

Implications of the Upright Position of Positive Pole

When people think with their emotions, some consider it a mishmash of illogic. Yet, Emotional Intelligence or Perceptivity, is being recognized as giving a person an edge in working with others. The symbol, a bit campy I admit, shows two people sharing a loving moment. Respect between people is a form of social love. Justice in our courts is a form of humanitarian love. Fixated on the “one true love” is the trap of MAYA, a demand of Ego, and yet a longing for connection deeper than either can imagine. Accomplished Irish poet John O’Donahue, a philosopher and Catholic priest said,”…You are joined in an ancient and eternal union with humanity that cuts across all barriers of time, convention, philosophy and definition. When you are blessed with an Anam Cara, (a Celtic concept of Essence Twin) the Irish believe you have arrived at that most sacred place: home.” The distortion of this romanticized view of loving another presumes that there is a lack of love in the Universe. There is not. Only a lack of willingness to let go and let it in.

Card messages in the Illuminated position.

+ Perceptivity

(Sensitivity, warmth, astute, affectionate, receptive, affinity, schmooze, emotive)

1. Are you feeling the tenor of a situation as well as analyzing it strategically? Name the emotions in play. You will have the advantage if you know your emotions but only express them as part of a necessary communication.
   
2. The heart always tells its truth. But it does not use words. The language of the mind and emotions must be matched and compared carefully. Allow yourself to name your emotions and you will have clarity of what they are trying to tell you.
3. Emotions drive everything! Knowing this truth of the heart lends one’s self to keen perceptivity and ability to sense the mood of others. Come from the heart and appeal to another person by revealing your genuine humanity.
4. When a person “gets gotten’ on the emotions driving their words, a tectonic shift of perception occurs moving them into a different state of self-awareness. Factors might show a drastic change (up or down) in defensiveness, but assuredly a revealed state of genuine expression. Now people ‘get real.’ Once allowed to flow, an opening produces new understanding and possibilities. 
5. Let your enthusiasm be infectious! Communicate your joy and excitement to others. Have fits of laughter and get the whole crowd cheering.
6. The Law of Emotion is simple: You have them or they have you! Feel them, don’t deny them. However, it doesn’t mean you should automatically act them out. They are fuel. Go inward and then outward.
7. The bridge between Essence and Personality and the Past and the Present is to give source name to your emotions: Love, Pain, Fear, Anger, Shame, Guilt. Whatever language you were raised with, the meaning is always at the core of any memory. Address is simply. Honor it profoundly.
8. Emotions drive everything! Realize this truth and your perceptivity to detect the moods of others can be a key asset in connecting to them.
9. As an Ordinal Center, know that everyone has emotion relative to everything. Whether they are strong, or barely detectable, is a function of how important something is to you. It is like volume on a music player while reading the words of the captions.

Quotation Illustrating the Overleaf in this pole

• “Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.” ~ Mark Twain
• “Music is the shorthand of emotion.” ~ Leo Tolstoy
• “The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.”~ Pablo Picasso
• “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• “Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.”~ Roger Ebert
• “There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.” ~ Carl Gustav Jung
• “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart” ― Helen Keller
• “Pity those who don’t feel anything at all.” ― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses
• “The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals it…” ― Nicholas Sparks, At First Sight
• “But feelings can’t be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem.” ― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
• “All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.” ― Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Implications of the Reversed Position or Negative Pole

In the photo, I admit that I played to a stereotypic American “church lady”, who always seems ready to reminisce about “the good old days”. Sentimentality and nostalgia are clung to when a person remembers what it felt like, instead of bringing awareness of the feeling present moment to them in the current moment. One looks to memory instead of paying attention to the present. Belief undercuts actual experience and a person loses the sweetness of a new experience or disregards the warning or staleness that is noted in a familiar thing. Either way, this is very much like referencing religious dogma instead of practicing intention by being present.

Card messages in the Shadow position.

– Sentimentality

(Nostalgia, moody, apprehensive, depressed, neurotic, resentful, impassive)

1. Sentimentality is looking to the past for emotions that once might have soothed or inspired you. Nostalgic reminiscence takes one out of present time and distorts the meaning of a current event. Is a current situation being misunderstood because of past sentiments? Be alert to fear being expressed as traditional values.
2. Be mindful of pitiful looks and behavior. Feeling sorry for someone, perhaps yourself, never addresses the real issue, and it will cause you to sidestep it altogether, postponing significant advancement.
3. Emotional illiteracy and confusion is present in many cultures that practice stoic self-repression or intimidation of those expressing authentically. A schism within an individual and societies result as those ‘feelings’ become explosive compounds. Set your gauges to detect pent-up resentment and address it before it is too late.
4. Dealing with a moody person? Is it you? The same question will help solve or be the release valve for the pent up feelings. Simply ask: “What underlying emotion are having that drives this mood?” Honesty might ensue at a high volume. If you cannot deal with feelings, then don’t ask.
5. Nostalgic reminiscing takes one out of present time. Sometimes pleasant, other times melancholy calling upon past feelings that are probably romanticized, a current event is being misinterpreted.
6. ‘Ah, the good old days!” Hey, they really weren’t that good. Your perception of the past is distorted because you’d prefer to be nostalgic about a past that your mind invented rather than deal with the now. Clear your head. Feeling is not wrong here, but you are indulging your fantasy about emotions you want to have instead of what actually was. How do these feelings or tendencies to look backward, instead of forward, function as part of your defenses?
7. Emotions mess with ones perception of time and memory. Make sure you are not concocting a fantasy from your past to escape a present and thus dull a potential future.
8. That was then, this is now. Stop romanticizing.
9. ‘Someone is verklempt!’ A term borrowed from Yiddish, it means one is choked-up with emotion; generally distraught, filled with angst, possibly on the verge of tears – if not sobbing. This is not a person to rely upon when this state is so clearly ruling the situation.
10. Suppressing emotion, and calling it strength, is a bit like inflating a balloon: the more you do it the more it is likely to pop! Controlled expulsion of pressure is called for, AND keep focused on dealing with the issue at the same time.

Quotation Illustrating the Overleaf in this pole

• “Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.” ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
  
• “It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes… we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions – especially selfish ones.” ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• ““He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another’s personality, marking vulnerable points.” ~ Ayn Rand
• “The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them.”~P. D. Ouspensky
• “I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
• “The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.” ― Horace Walpole
• “I don’t like hope very much. In fact, I hate it. It’s the crystal meth of emotions. It hooks you fast and kills you hard. It’s bad news. The worst. It’s sharp sticks and cherry bombs. When hope shows up, it’s only a matter of time until someone gets hurt.” ― Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution
• Schadenfreude is a German concept which has come to mean: “taking pleasure from the pain or misfortune of others.” Such a malignancy is distilled from a root of hatred so deep, you might as well call it evil. If you detect this in anyone, run! For those who relish it seek to create it for others. It is the worst kind of drug. Michael’s Consortium through Stephen Cocconi, 2019

Relevance in  the Michael Teaching

The Emotional Center – the 4th chakra is at the mid point of the body and is the central focus of the Assemblage Point.  In the positive pole of this Center, Essence seeks for us to know the nuance of situations at the level of feeling and that of flavors of energy we call emotion: energy in motion. Perception is laced with a sensitivity to all the flavors of emotion making events distinguishable not by unique or discrete category like Discrimination but by degrees of heat, or direction, or volume, or substance. Having this capacity may, depending upon the culture or family in which it occurs, be elevated as a gift of concern for others or as a hindrance and weakness.

The Emotionally centered person cannot help but to sense, if not to some degree synchronize, with the resonance of another person. This is the feature of being wired with this Center first.  Instead of watching a person’s behavior, the Emotionally Centered person is likely to tune into the tone of voice as the relay of emotion emanating from someone’s communication. We might say that these are “people oriented” folk who receive more validation from relating to others than by ideas or labels. As a result, they require the warmth of human contact more-so that those of the Intellectual or Moving Centers. Yet, like the Kinesthetic (Moving) Center, caress and touch are essential to health. When a person is “out-of-touch” with this center, they might appear cool or withdrawn, reacting awkwardly to overtures of affection.

In the negative pole, an Emotionally Centered person may be skewed and biased by what he knows and values.  Like the Spiritualist, whose knowledge depends in part from their validation from deep states of feeling, both can mistake a strong emotional reaction as truth, instead of attachment to their beliefs.

Cultural Meaning

Products are sold on the strength of an emotional tie made to a favorite memory or rapacious fear. Representing the most divergent aspect of the human animal, emotions are what spur the artist to create beauty and the wild, incensed, and crazed person to act out hate in a fashion we would label as monstrous and horrific. History is dotted with myths, stories, and accounts plotting a graph of tremendous variation possible to the human heart: the real driver of action.

The mind and emotions may formulate a truce and indeed a partnership, but the historic animosity between the two seem to alienate human concern and human calculation much in the same way that carbon dioxide and oxygen maintain a delicate balance in our biosphere. Each are necessary and each may bring devastation to an environment when the proportions are imprecise. When the mind is set to help understand an regulate the release of emotions, the resulting tempered flows can irrigate a person with the nectar intended from Spirit without flooding the life and drowning thought completely.

“It is a grave injustice to a child or adult to insist that they stop crying. One can comfort a person who is crying which enables him to relax and makes further crying unnecessary; but to humiliate a crying child is to increase his pain, and augment his rigidity. We stop other people from crying because we cannot stand the sounds and movements of their bodies. It threatens our own rigidity. It induces similar feelings in ourselves which we dare not express and it evokes a resonance in our own bodies which we resist.”
― Alexander Lowen, The Voice of the Body

Famous Examples

Nicolas Cage,

You might be emotionally centered if…

List of traits from the EPP

by Stephen Cocconi ©2011, Updated 2024

For a Motivation Cards Reading or Channeled Consultation call: 209.768-4956 or email Stephen at channeling@themichaelteaching.com