All the colors of the rainbow

Synchronicity: A Theory of Interactions, part 5: synchronicity as a system response

I hate the feeling of shame. I felt shame a lot as a kid, often comparing myself to others.

Anger is hard for me too. I have often tried to control myself from expressing anger. I didn't have a mentor for good ways to do it. Yet, by sharing my shame with others, I have felt more connected to my community and able to receive more love.

By expressing anger in the right place at the right time I've actually deepened my relationships because people get to know me better.

Emotions are like colors of the rainbow

I've come to appreciate emotions in the same way I appreciate colors of the rainbow. I do have my favorites— blue and purple—but I use all of them at different times! Imagine building city streets without the color red for stop signs. Imagine urban landscapes without any green. No thanks!

Think of yourself as white light, an even mix of all the colors. In the course of your daily interactions you bump up against people who elicit certain colorful reactions from you.

Why do certain emotions arise at certain times? The situations we end up in often prod us in just the right way to create a certain emotion. In this sense, I think of everything as synchronicity. For instance, I was barbecuing for the family when Dana came out to keep me company. I needed a fork to test the food, so I asked her to go inside for a fork. When she got back with the fork, I realized I needed a knife too, so I asked her to go back in for a knife. She rolled her eyes at me!

Dana was just joking around, and it was perfectly reasonable to be annoyed to go back in the second time. But I still had a reaction because she triggered a filter for me. It felt like "nobody's on my team." This might be true with some people some of the time, but it's definitely not true with Dana.

Just in the course of cooking dinner we can expect to have our tender emotions prodded. For a passing moment, I felt my inner prism refracting sadness and loneliness.

Acknowledge the filter

To catch a glimpse of your own filters, notice when something or somebody rubs you the wrong way. What are your thoughts about it? What are your feelings about it? What did your body feel like when that happened?

Then try to make a short, simple statement like mine above. It should only be from about 4 to 10 words. Any more than that the power of the truth in it gets diluted.

Once you've identified your filter, you might be able to see it more often around you. 

If you want to see the color red, you might go looking for an octagonal stop sign shape. Similarly, if you want to notice your filters in action, notice what your body feels like. Tension in your shoulders means one thing while discomfort in your belly means another.

When you feel these sensations, Notice the colors of emotion passing through your inner prism.

Being triggered can be a beautiful giftt if we can enjoy the colors of our emotions and not feel tossed around by them

Welcome to a Leap to Wholeness

We are starting a new series of social media posts around my second book, Leap to Wholeness, How the World is Programmed to Help Us Grow, Heal, and Adapt. One of the big themes in the book is identifying the filters that color the way we look at the world and ourselves. When we can identify a filter or belief we have, without trying to change it, we naturally start to see it better and it's easier to see beyond it. I offer this as a way of healing our old patterns of behavior.