Emotional Awareness: What Have You Been Emotionally Eating?

It has been said that “you are what you eat” and this is especially true when it comes to your emotional diet. Perhaps you have never thought about a diet in terms of an emotional one. It may seem enough of a challenge to just be concerned with what foods you are putting into your mouth, not to mention the possibility of paying attention to another equally important kind of diet. You are consuming emotional energy all the time even though you may not realize it. In other words, you are eating energy all time. This kind of eating may not show up as calories and nutrients in your body, but show up in your body it does!

Think of emotion as energy in motion. That energy is present everywhere you go where there is human interaction. And when you get caught up in your emotions and those of the people around you, you are eating the quality of energy the emotion is conveying.

Many of you know that eating organic or minimally processed food is what is best for your body. What exactly is best for your emotional body and its diet? Just as with the food you put into your mouth, the same is true with emotional food – “you are what you eat.” Currently the American (if not most of the world’s) emotional diet is filled with “junk food.” Emotional “junk food” is the emotions that are the result of our old fear-based belief structure and all the thoughts, stories and internal dialogue that this program creates in your mind.

If emotions are the energy that drives the human dream, then we can see clearly what the most prevalent emotions are – all you have to do is turn on your TV for the evening news.  The content of the news has a very particular emotional flavor, and all the food it produces reflects the content of the stories reported.
Every movie or TV show you watch is constantly creating different emotional energies or messages within the content of the story. Even while reading a newspaper, magazine or a novel you will produce an emotional response to the content, even though it may be undetectable on the surface. If you observe people conversing, there is an emotional component to the topic they are talking about. All of the responses to your life experiences, from the very subtle to the very powerful emotional outbursts, resonate in your physical body as sensation and show up in your body physically.

Perhaps it is becoming clear that the quality of your emotional diet determines the quality of your life. The conditioned mind and all of the interpretations you make daily are what create the emotional or feeling response within you and in all the people that you interact with. You are constantly eating emotions but what are the quality of the emotions you are eating? In your own mind, your interpretations and the thoughts and stories that you create in your internal conversations, create a corresponding emotional response.  This is what becomes the basis of your emotional diet.

When you practice awareness, you are putting your attention on the content of your internal dialogue and assessing whether it contributes to your emotional well-being or if the content contains beliefs that diminish your self worth and intrinsic value.  You are also becoming more willing to experience the feeling in your body because there is valuable information in what your body is telling you. In your practice of mastering awareness, when you no longer support or agree with false beliefs in your mind, then right away, a formerly unhealthy emotional diet begins to transform and you will notice this in the way you feel.

When you can really see how your emotions are created and you take responsibility for what you are “feeding on” then you empower yourself to make long lasting changes in your feeling body.  When those old reactions that feel as though you have been blind-sided without knowing how you got there, you can see them as learning opportunities. The old response was the question, “How can I control my emotions?”  With more awareness, the more appropriate question is, “How can I monitor the beliefs and thoughts created in my mind and put choice into action?” The choice is always to believe what you hear within your own mind – or to not believe yourself (or anyone else).
By challenging your beliefs about yourself and the personal stories that are filled with self-judgment, and realizing that making the choice of more self acceptance, you can manifest a change in your emotional diet and start eating emotional food that is actually good for you and gives you the energy to create a life without limits.
Rita Rivera Fox