Clear View, Clear Action

We all face difficulty. Simultaneously, we can feel completely alone in our struggle through that difficulty. Yet, we’re not alone, we only feel alone. That feeling of aloneness may originate from the broken ways we all communicate with each other. And, listening plays a huge role in that communication; what we say after listening can transform the dynamic between people.

The concern, then, is in continuing to listen after we speak. We easily become caught up in our own response and lose sight of what the other person says next. It is very easy to lose our clear vision, and once we lose that clear vision, we have lost the ability for clear action.

There are so many tactics and strategies that people use consistently and constantly that cloud clear vision with raw emotion. Our emotions and feelings are our own, yet we give people carrots and sticks to manipulate those emotions.

It’s not that these people use those carrots and sticks maliciously. Simply, they, like us, want to be free of pain and free of suffering. They feel, mistakenly, that if they have it their way, the pain and suffering will simply disappear. Over most of their life, they’ve learned how to poke and prod people with these carrots and sticks, and still, they hurt and suffer. Possibly, there never has been due consideration of the effectiveness of this strategy.

Remember In our youth, the carrots from others were few and the sticks were many. This is why bullying is ever-present today. There are multitudes of ways in which to wield and throw those sticks now. Not only do we have our mouth, we also have the web and texting.

This reminds me of the evolution of our species. We used rocks and sticks as cavemen. As humanity evolved, we began to use these as tools, less as weapons. We learned to grow those carrots, not just eat them.

There are parallels to our growing up and becoming adults. We don’t just eat the carrots we’re given; we grow carrots and give them away now. That’s having a clear vision and seeing it through to clear action: preparing the field, planting a crop, tending the crop, picking the product, protecting the product, and everyday tending of the field: clear vision through to sustained clear action.

Between the clear vision and the clear action are so many steps, as this analogy clearly shows. The field is our life, the crops are the ideas we allow in our lives, and the product is our action. Our action is what grows out of how well we’ve taken care of our life and the ideas that we plant and nourish there. Our action can be planted by others or by only ourselves.

What people do with our ideas is primarily up to others and the states of their lives. Some people are currently in a state where the field that is their life has been poisoned and drained of nutrients. That’s why any good idea must be accompanied with nourishment. Otherwise, the idea may never grow anywhere but in our own field.

We must tend to the fields that surround us for two major reasons: others’ sake and our sake. How is it that the community our life is surrounded by affects our field? Run-off. Run-off from the poisons in their fields drains into ours; their poisons are our poisons.

We can counteract these by constantly taking care of ourselves and consistently nourishing all of our life. Also, the atmosphere, the air around us, is almost impossible to clean up on our own, yet it runs right over, around and through us. It has never made more sense why some people choose the life of a hermit.

As we take care of ourselves and nourish our spirit, we gain clear vision. We’re ready to plant what we want to grow. We must keep in mind that it may take many growing seasons to not only prepare our field but many seasons to produce the completely clear action that others would be willing to take into their life. Tend to your fields and to your communities with joy, compassion and patience. Those are universal nourishments that clear the air, clean the soil and ready us for action.

The journey from clear vision to clear action isn’t as simple as some fancy phrase. The journey is what we are; the action is what we make of what we are. The journey is just beginning.

The Drawbacks and the Alternatives of the Elation Zone

Different states of mind are associated with both productive and destructive outcomes. One of the more challenging states of mind is the elation zone, where feelings of positivity are intense, enhanced and sustained. It alters our perceptions and our reactions as well as how we interact with both the environment and others.

We interpret the majority of data as being proof to sustain that elation zone. This elation zone feels as if the tide is high, and we've become immersed in the extraordinary and intense sensations that make up the elation experience. We're so thrilled about how good we feel, we neglect and elect to ignore what we're losing at the expense of gathering and attempting to hold onto that excited, vibrational state in our body/mind connection. Any excited state burns us out when sustained for an extended period.

This heightened state of awareness and action can certainly accumulate a mixed bag of results and effects. The constructive potential is high but so is the potential to destroy and tear down what we see or what we choose to ignore. Redirecting this raw energy can be a critical step in beginning to move forward with a more durable productivity.

If we change how we experience this raw energy, we can transform our present moment tremendously. Instead of directing it externally, we could have a direct experience and sit with the energy and get to know it, we'll learn to adapt it to our needs instead of becoming haphazardly rampant. The attempt here is to disengage the energy from undesirable and unintended consequences. We do not want to lose this personal power zone; we simply wish to channel and harness it effectively and effeciently.

The Emotional Dysregulation Concern

Wherever we go, we see people suffering, sometimes silently, sometimes not so silently. What is the primary source of this suffering? Finding the source of a problem is absolutely an essential place to begin this exploration into solving the issue.

We live in a society that is plagued by broken emotional regulatory systems. This lack of a working emotional regulatory system (ERS) is the largest societal concern before every one of us. It will bring about increased conflicts, increased divides and increased dis-ease within our society.

In the age of the internet, social networks and cable television, people are less in touch with each other, less in touch with themselves and less in touch with absorbing different or expansive ideas. More information has created a stress upon humanity.

Technological advances throughout our human history, back to the invention of the alphabet and the printing press, all have taken generations to absorb and incorporate effectively into daily existence. It seems natural, then, that such an all pervasive technological assault would create such an enormous upheaval within our society.

We're going to break this down for our own benefit. Having this nifty idea of an "emotional regulatory system" is just that if we do not lay out what that system actually does and how it works.

We must first lay out that all emotions are based within ourselves only. Emotions are not able to be piped into a human being; emotions are contained entirely within the mind and the self. Certainly, external stimuli can set off an emotional cascade inside of us, but those emotions are always available to each of us.

The primary reason for our broken ERS is the idea that someone or something else is making us feel the way we do. If we do not have an initial understanding that these emotions are our own, we can have no hope of ever doing anything about them. As long as we see our feelings as coming from outside of us, where is the initiative to ever explore those feelings honestly?

In this modern age of on-the-go technology it becomes far too easy for people to just avoid situations and people that trigger intense emotional states within us. We just remove them from our list or from our phone. We stop going to places where we see people who may have a different idea or live differently from us. This self-selecting process away from more difficult emotions makes it less likely that we will ever find a way to effectively handle those emotional states in the future.

People interact with what they agree with only, demean what they most certainly disagree with always and don't care at all about anything they do not already know. The sticky problems never get dealt with or discussed, the differences define us and the other guy is always the enemy. You can see the impact of our broken ERS on a small scale and on a large scale; from politics in our country and in our communities, to politics in the work place and at home.

Emotional dysregulation within ourselves and how that impacts all of us shows how much we need each other. When one hurts, we all hurt. How can we strengthen our ERS? How can we help others turn on their own ERS? There are no easy fixes here.

One of the most critical parts of the mind has stopped working for countless human beings. Before we tackle the larger societal problems, we must activate our own emotional regulatory system and begin strengthening and nourishing it. Thankfully, there are countless experiences in everyday that can aid us in this effort.

We must remind ourselves consistently and constantly that what we feel is our own feeling and that those feelings do not come from anyone or anything else. We are not puppets with emotions for strings. Our emotions are our own. The way we deal with those emotions is also our own.