From Arousal To Love In Body Consciousness
By Bart Sharp
In my journey in evolving my body consciousness I was told once there are five basic emotions and all of the rest of the emotions stem from these five. They are anger, sadness, shame, fear and arousal. The first four are pretty clear but arousal is a bit more complicated. Arousal is the desire to expand into pleasant sensations or feelings. It can be love, it can be physical affection. It can also be eating a candy bar or watching a movie. These are all things that arouse us into pleasure.
One of the more interesting ideals in these schemes of these five emotions is four of the emotions have a negative connotation while arousal is perceived as positive or rewarding. For most people arousal is the path they are seeking, the desire to feel good prevails over what other emotions can teach us. People want the “all good” reality but the fact remains we live in a variety of emotions. When we want only the arousal state we are likely to create a duality or polarity with arousal and the other negative emotions in our body consciousness. One is good and the others are bad. This sets us up to a life of avoiding bad and striving for good.
In the reality of body consciousness we cannot avoid emotions. They will come up and if they are judged as bad we will never learn of the purpose of why they appeared in our life. We will do enough to remove them and then return to seeking arousal. Sadly when we do this arousal does not feel so good because it is not authentic.
The deeper purpose of emotions is to move us to completely immerse ourselves into life, to feel and live it fully. Negative emotions appear in our life to move us, teach us and strive for a more authentic life. When we learn the lesson that our feeling stimulate we can receive arousal more whole heartedly.
Depression and addiction are great examples of avoidance. We avoid anger then something like depression appears or addiction as it is a general avoidance by repetitively using a substance or behavior to avoid a lesser pleasant reality. People in these states cannot fully feel something like happiness or love because their non-feeling turns everything down or off. The target here is to feel all emotions fully, arousal will become more profound as a result.
Eventually as we evolve with this concept of accepting emotions we will find we can relax into emotions without much negative charge. We still feel them but that do not influence us to over react as if we have less control in the situation. Our body consciousness evolves to a stronger position than our ego and emotional defensiveness.
When we are able to learn tools to resolve emotions and begin living a life where we are balanced, arousal feels much more authentic. We can enjoy all of life, we do not need a big stimulus to make us happy but the small things give us much pleasure. At the same time we will feel emotions such as anger or sadness more fully, they will be very present inside of us because we no longer avoid them. A part of the healing process is resolving the defenses we created to not feel therefore we feel the fears in our life and what is occurring in the world more acutely. However, when we learn to process our emotions we are learning tools to resolve these issues that emotions bring to us. We will feel things like anger more, be able to express it in a proactive way and then move on to feeling more complete in ourselves. We may finally be able to feel arousal more completely than we ever have. Body conscious evolves and emotional fears from the mind subside.
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