Let’s look at the Map Of Your Emotional Heart.
As we continue to talk about emotional tools the map of your emotional heart is a powerful tool to incorporate into your toolbox. All of those things that feel like they are happening to you, or the detail that feel overwhelming in your life, look and feel different when mapped out on a piece of paper. When you put it all out on paper in this way, all of a sudden you are gifted a new perspective. The things that felt big and overwhelming start to feel more manageable.
You will be able to see that even the negative things happening in your life have purpose. The negative experience, emotions, and reactions that you are experiencing all become information that is designed to help you.
Figure 1. Your Emotional Heart:
So let’s start with you and your emotional heart. This is you, a brilliant mix of divinity woven into human form. You are a completely unique expression of truth, essence of love, and creation of life. You are filled with purpose and power to create.
You came into this unique expression of life worthy, valuable, and significant as you are. You are the only you that will ever be able to fill your spot at the table of humanity. It is marked solely for you and there is worth, value, and significance in the fact that you are you.
While your being is completely unique and individualized you are also part of the whole. You are not just connected to every other being at the table of humanity but you are also connected with every expression and form of life. You can feel it when you stand at the edge of something grand like the ocean, mountains, or sprawling landscapes. You can also feel it from the opposite vantage point, when you see what seems to be glitter woven into a butterflies wings or witnessing an artistic landscape naturally formed within a flower’s petal. You can feel that you are small part of something so much bigger then yourself.
Figure 2. Your fundamental & Essential Truth:
Now let’s talk about essential truth. This is the essential truth that your divinity wove throughout your humanity. This fundamental truth will always be calling to you even when the layers of humanity try to muffle or confuse it.
These truths are at the forefront when you are living into the fullest expression of yourself: full of life, fully supported, worthy, enthusiastic, curious, joy-filled, intrigued, and resilient just to name a few. While it is important to foster these truths in your life, you don’t have to earn them because your divinity gifted them to your humanity.
From the vantage point of your essential truth, nothing is off limits to you. You are present, engaged, and free to be in harmony with the world around you.
Often this is where mantras come from. They are langue focused on plugging you back into your essential truth. In the diagram you will see a few listed:
- I Am Connected
- I Am Strong
- I Am Miraculous
- I Am Powerful
- I Am Love And Loved
- I Am Whole
- Everything That I Need Is Provided For Me
- Anything Is Possible
You can watch Season Two of Awakening to Your Story TV to help you foster your essential truth.
Figure 3. Your Limiting Beliefs:
These are handed down beliefs that contradict your essential truth. They are exactly what they say they are… beliefs that limit you, your heart, and your experience as a human being.
As you start to adopt these limiting beliefs they restrict your capacity of heart and the ability to express and engage from your truth. With every liming belief it’s as if your capacity of heart gets more bound and constricted.
You go through life picking up these liming beliefs from other people. Whether being told things directly or by witnessing them in situations around you, you start believing the limitation. The limiting thoughts sneak in and before you know it you’re doubting the truth and replaying the limitation over and over again.
When someone hands down something limiting to you, that person is usually expressing themselves through their own fear and limitation. Their truth has been masked by fear and often they don’t even know it. No matter where or who it came from, a limiting belief is still just a belief. It’s something you have a choice in, because you have the power to believe in anything your heart desires.
With every thought you are fortifying your truth or you limiting belief.
Figure 4. Your Mind:
Your brain is such a powerful part of your humanity. But it’s important to understand that it’s a tool that you control, it doesn’t control you. You have the power to choose your thoughts, to engage your imagination, and to focus wherever it is you want to focus.
As we look at the map of your emotional heart, two parts of your brain (the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex) are important contributing factors.
Your amygdala is in charge of you survival. It’s known as the fight, flight, or freeze part of your brain. Also known as the fear center of your brain, it is linked to all those limiting beliefs. It acts as your security system. It creates a negative bias so that you are always scanning to make sure you know what is wrong around you. This can help you stay safe in your physical emotional environment. While all of those tasks can be very helpful, you don’t want that amygdala part your brain to run on autopilot keeping you in a pattern of survival.
Your prefrontal cortex is in charge of your creativity, high-level thinking, focus, and imagination. It influences your actions and helps you make decisions. It is also linked to all of your essential and fundamental truth. When this part of your brain is fully activated you can really see all of the elements around you coming together and working in your favor. You also have the function of intuitive problem solving skills at your deposal when this part of your brain is engaged.
Figure 5. Patterns of Thinking:
So here is the thing you have to remember; your brain is itself a tool so that your humanity and divinity to create the life before you. You run it, it does not run you. You also have the power to witness your thoughts and adjust if you don’t happen to like where they are going. This is called metacognition and comes in handy when we talk about patters of thinking.
When you have activated a pattern of thought from your amygdala, limiting beliefs, or fear you can become stuck in a loop of suffering. It keeps you focused on what is wrong and what feels bad. When left unchecked it can feel like you are living in a constant state of survival. But you have autonomy over this pattern of thought. It might feel as if you must take direction from those thoughts and feeling but that is not actually the case.
When you’ve activated a pattern of thinking from your prefrontal cortex you are set on a solution oriented journey back to your essential truth. It activates a wellspring of possibility and holds your focus on what’s working in your favor and your path forward. It is important to understand that you always have the power to choose this pattern of thinking. Even if you are on a more limited path of thinking, you have the power to disrupt it and make your way back to one that feels better.
Everything you experience and co-create into reality is woven together by your patterns of thought. It’s important to understand that you have autonomy your patterns of thinking.
Figure 6. Your Information And Reactions:
Everything in your life is information designed to help you. The world around you is a mirror that reflects what is in your own heart back to you. Sometimes it reflects all that brilliant and magical truth that is woven into 
your being, sometimes it reflects the limiting beliefs that have been keeping you bound. But it is always information that can help you, as long as you use it.
If information comes in and bumps up against a limiting belief, you will feel yourself having a reaction to it. There are endless negative emotional reactions that you may feel some of them could be: stress, anxiety, frustration, anger, resentment, jealous, or rage. If you are feeling this kind of internal reaction, there isn’t anything wrong with you.
It means that the information is there in your experience to help you create consciousness and language around a limiting belief. This helps you evaluate that limiting belief to see if it is really serving your higher good or if maybe you are actually ready to be free of it and how it has been holding you back.
Let the moment be an indicator showing you what limiting belief is ready to be shifted back to your truth. If you can do that you will absolutely make room in your heart to feel better.
Figure 7. Your Volume:
Emotional Volume is directly correlated to the information that filters into your life and the emotional impact it has on you. Sometimes the volume is low, meaning that information has come into your life and your reaction to it is minor.
If you find similar information that keeps showing up or you keep having the same kind of negative emotional reaction in your life, this is the volume getting turned up for you. This rise in volume is not a punishment and no one is out to get you.
Although if you don’t use the volume as a tool to help you, I can see how the increased negative experiences might start feel like the world is out to get you. That swell of negative emotion can feel like something that keeps chipping away at you or it can feel very overwhelming. Volume comes in all shapes and sizes and will usually keep on increasing until you pay attention to the pertinent information.
Your reactions may also get bigger as the volume gets increased. It may feel like you can no longer contain your reaction to just emotion and you may become physically reactive too. That increased volume is designed to help you pay attention and focus on the information in your story. That reaction makes it impossible not to pay attention to the emotional worth that needs your attention.
Figure 8. A Way Of Healing:
When you use the information, volume, and reaction as an indicator that there is a limiting belief that needs your attention, you put yourself on a path of healing. As you look back over your heart map remember to stay curious about it all.
Your reaction will give language to the limiting belief and help you illustrate what has been keeping your heart bound. As you engage with your heart map you will notice that your new vantage point allows your amygdala to calm down. From there you can examine that limiting belief from that higher-level thinking, place of possibility, offered by your prefrontal cortex.
With curiosity you can call the limiting belief out for what it is, a belief that limits you. Whether it is attached to some past pain or person it is important to remember you are in this present moment and they are all details that can be labeled on your map. They don’t have the power to hurt you anymore so you can let your prefrontal cortex finally have a look at them my your amygdala takes a rest. Remember you have the ability to change and shift what you believe. From there you start to ask yourself things like:
- Where did this come from?
- Who pasted it down to me?
- When did I adopt it into my belief system?
- Do I still need to carry it with me?
- What do I feel about it now?
- Is there something else that I believe instead?
- Is there something within my essential truth that I need to come back to?
- How would I rather feel?
- What would I rather think?
- What feels more like a thought that is authentically me?
Remember that when other people teach you or put you through things that are negative or limiting they are creating with you through their own limitation. So don’t make your healing about them, because it really isn’t. Your healing is about your heart and you returning to your truth and being allowed to become even more of who you really are.
As you use all of this to heal, you will also find that it isn’t as much about that external factor or “information” as it is about your own emotional heart and story.
Figure 9. A Way Of Re-Patterning Your Thoughts:
Now that you have called out the limiting belief and found your way back to your essential truth, it is important realize that from there you will have to re-pattern your thoughts. People often think once they have found a place of healing within their emotional heart map that’s all it takes. But when a pattern of thought has been running through your mind for a long time you will have to actively work to re-pattern it.
One thought and feeling at a time you will be working to shift from a limiting pattern of thinking to a fortifying pattern of thinking.
The limiting pattern of thought is:
- Focused on them
- Associated with the liming belief
- Helps you shrink down and become reactive in your life
The fortifying pattern of thought is:
- Focused on your own heat
- Associated with your essential truth
- Helps you become more of who you really are
I use the analogy of the jellyfish beach vs. the piña colada beach to help you re-pattern your thoughts. It gives you a visual that can help you make a conscious choice over the thoughts you choose to think.
The jellyfish beach is associated with the limiting belief covered in jellyfish. There is no shade and the water is rough and filled with sharks. You can’t walk or swim without worry and suffering. There is no place to sit or be without discomfort. There only seems to be struggle waiting for you.
The Piña Colada Beach is associated with your essential truth and is awe-inspiring. The crystal clear water laps up on the pristine beach. Majestic turtles wait to swim with you and there are palm trees, a hammock, a lounge chair, and a piña colada waiting for you. It’s peaceful and there are endless moments of joy waiting to be created.
Now with each thought you are building a path through a grassy dune to one of these beaches. You have the power to choose which one you want to find yourself dealing with. Think of your mind as the grass covered sand dune… your limiting belief may have caused you to walk to the jellyfish beach a number of times. It may have even been years or decades of walking that same path. Each time wearing down the grass so that the sand came through.
When you are working to re-pattern your limiting belief back to your truth you have to understand that it’s a process. You have to consciously choose to forage a new path to a new beach. Then you have to choose that path over the old path time and time again, until it becomes second nature to you. Eventually the grass will have grown up over the jellyfish path making it even easier to choose the path of truth.
So those are the basics of how the map of your own emotional heart works. Play with it and see what you can uncover for yourself.
If you want some additional help using the heart map you will find the Starter Kit below.
Let me know if you have questions, I am here for you.
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