Develop Emotional Awareness | A Powerful 5-Step Exercise

OVERVIEW: This in-depth guide explores what emotional awareness is and offers a series of practical exercises to grow your emotional intelligence.

______________

It’s hard to appreciate how much of our behavior is driven by emotions.

They are the driving force of our unconscious behavior.

Emotions lead our decisions and influence virtually everything we do.

What’s amazing is that this powerful influence usually happens outside our awareness.

Often, we don’t even realize how emotions are ruling our lives.

However, as we build greater emotional awareness through specific exercises, that begins to change.

Let’s dive in …

CONTENTS

What is Self-Awareness?

First, let’s clarify our terms.

Self-awareness is knowing what we’re experiencing while enabling us to monitor and regulate what’s occurring internally.

It is the ability to know what we are doing as we do it and understand why we are doing it. Self-aware individuals are more conscious of their thoughts, feelings, attitudes, behaviors, and impulses.

That is, with self-awareness comes an increase in consciousness to perceive what’s happening and more accurately interpret its meaning.

What is Emotional Awareness?

Emotional awareness is a component of self-awareness. It’s the ability to recognize what we’re feeling as well as the feelings of others. Emotional awareness gives us the ability to regulate our emotional landscape without getting overwhelmed.

Emotionally aware individuals can empathize with others. Without emotional awareness, we can’t accurately read or understand what others are truly feeling and therefore are unable to empathize.

The higher our level of emotional awareness, the more tuned-in we are to what we’re feeling and why we’re feeling it.

Emotional awareness is a vital component of emotional intelligence.

What Does it Mean to Lack Emotional Awareness?

If we are not conscious of what we’re feeling, in the language of depth psychology, we are said to be mostly unconscious.

When we are unconscious of our feelings, we lack emotional awareness.

When we have emotional awareness, we can:

Accurately perceive our emotional landscape,
Navigate our emotions with the help of reasoning, and
Effectively self-regulate our emotions.

However, when we lack emotional awareness, our emotions often cause internal tension that leads to a host of problems, including neurotic tendencies, unsupportive behaviors, emotional numbness, and general discontent.

Five Levels of Emotional Awareness

The Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) is part of a developmental model of emotions based on Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.

The levels of emotional awareness scale was developed over 30 years ago. Additional research since then has validated and refined this model.

The five levels of emotional awareness are:¹

Level 1: Body sensations (how emotions feel within the body)

Level 2: Action tendencies (your emotions indicate whether you want to go toward or away from a situation because you associate with it feeling “good” or “bad.”)

Level 3: Individual feelings (discrete and specific, one-dimensional emotional feeling states; eg. “I feel angry.”)

Level 4: Blends of feelings (“the capacity to have feelings that are opposed to or clearly different from each other; eg. feeling sad yet hopeful.”)

Level 5: Blends of blends of feeling (“the capacities to appreciate complexity in the experiences of self and other simultaneously.”)

In essence, these five levels of emotional awareness represent increasing development in one’s perception of feelings: from more basic (body sensation) to complex (a multi-dimensional and nuanced state of feelings of oneself and others). This distinction will be important later on in this guide.

How Do You Relate to Negative Emotions?

Before learning how to develop greater emotional awareness, it is instructive to become more conscious of our orientation toward emotions in general.

Our orientation toward negative emotions will have a significant effect on how we approach them.

If we view negative emotions as something we shouldn’t have to experience, we will naturally resist them. However, if we accept that negative emotions are a natural part of our life experience, we may be more open and curious to work with them.

Consider your orientation toward negative emotions like anger, fear, grief, and shame:

Do you get irritated when you experience these emotions?
Are you afraid of these feelings?
Are you anxious to get rid of negative emotions when they arise?
Do you believe negative emotions are only for weak people?
Can you observe a pattern of seeking pleasure to escape from your feelings?
Do you view negative emotions as a part of life?
Do you believe you’re capable of accepting whatever you’re feeling?

Take a minute to reflect on how you perceive and relate to negative emotions within yourself.

Creating a New Orientation Toward Emotions

Most of us subconsciously develop the habit of judging or trying to control our feelings. As such, if you want to build emotional awareness, it’s helpful to establish a new framework.

In my understanding, for example, emotions are a form of energy. There are no “wrong” feelings. Feelings often seem irrational until we understand their source.

Also, we are not our emotions, but they reside within us. The feelings we don’t contain are necessarily “spread” onto those around us.

We either accept the emotion or resist it. Resistance makes the feeling grow stronger within us. Acceptance puts us on a path of resolution.

Emotions are, in essence, a unique form of data or information that we can process.

Processing emotions helps us expand our consciousness when we fully understand the meaning they point us to.

How to Begin Developing Emotional Awareness

The body plays a profound role in our ability to apprehend what’s going on inside of us.

As I explained in this Integrated Approach to Self-Awareness, it’s essential to focus on two key areas:

Address existing trauma that’s stored in the body
Learn how to sink your awareness into your body

Both of these areas are integral to cultivating emotional awareness. Our lack of emotional awareness (numbness) is a result of unprocessed trauma, as Dr. Bessel van der Kolk points out in The Body Keeps the Score.

This early trauma leads to energetic blockage (that causes numbness) and divorces us from our bodies. By addressing this trauma and reforging our connection to the body, our emotional awareness often improves on its own.

The more you sink your awareness into your body, the more present you become. With a deeper presence, more conscious attention goes to your emotional and energetic body.

As you facilitate greater body-mind integration, you can also focus on specific emotional awareness exercises.

Two Common Ways We Avoid Our Emotions

To avoid embracing our true feelings, we often follow two predictable patterns:

Distracting ourselves, and
Moving too quickly.

Both of these patterns are so “normal” that we don’t even think about them. “Well, everyone does that!” Yet, by staying distracted—for example, constantly checking our devices—and moving too quickly from one thing to the next, we ensure that we don’t pay attention to what’s going on inside of us.

Ultimately, these two “normal habits” are a sly form of avoidance behavior. An essential part of developing emotional awareness is learning to slow down with whatever we’re doing.

Then, we can become more receptive to internal information (like feelings) that we’re currently repressing and suppressing.

Emotional Awareness Starts From Your Center

Before we attempt to cultivate emotional awareness, it’s important to get acquainted with the concept of the Center.

The Center is that at-home feeling within ourselves. When we’re in the Center, we are calm, clear, alert, and neutral. That is, in the Center, the ego isn’t reactive or easily triggered.

The Center is our natural home. Trauma draws us out of the Center early in life. As we address our trauma, there’s a natural movement back toward our inner home.

Learning how to center yourself is a vital step in building emotional awareness because it increases our focus and attention. Attention is essential for learning, understanding, and developing in any area. The quality of our attention will determine the efficacy of any emotional awareness exercise you use.

Thankfully, we have many available practices we can use to cultivate attention and many of these methods also help us build emotional awareness.

(For a powerful and simple practice, you can use each day to access your Center quickly and consistently, check out The Mastery Method: Activate Your Higher Potential.)

The Role of Archetypes in Building Emotional Awareness

The reason we often lack emotional awareness is that the ego is essentially a collection of archetypal patterns.

Each archetype acts semi-autonomously. That is, each archetype within the psyche has its own feelings, thoughts, and judgments.

Different subpersonalities frequently shift within one’s consciousness. As such, our feelings can change rapidly. We can have a blending of feelings and even contradictory feelings.

Is it any wonder that many of us subconsciously try to avoid our feelings entirely?

Developing the Inner Observer to Support Emotional Awareness

The key to many forms of meditation is to develop what’s called the inner observer, observing self, or observing mind.

Archetypally speaking, the observing mind is a primary function of the Magician archetype (also called the Sage). When we access this Magician energy, we gain a unique perspective on our emotional landscape.

Here, we’re not so interested in the content of the mind (thoughts, sensory perception); instead, we want to meditate on the meditator. By cultivating the inner observer, we create a space between the doer of actions, the thinker of thoughts, and the feeler of feelings. The observing self can then monitor our thoughts, feelings, actions, and gut reactions with objectivity.

It’s important to understand that most of us don’t have this observing self to a high degree unless we cultivate it through conscious practice. Without this inner observer, we can’t develop emotional awareness.

Also, remember, early trauma makes the Center elusive; only in the Center does the observing mind come alive. If you’re new to meditation, see this in-depth guide on meditation training.

5 Ways of Dealing with Negative Emotions

Now, let’s look at the various ways we deal with negative emotions. We have a variety of options:

1) Repress the Emotion

We repress the feelings to the point where we’re not conscious of them. In these cases, we project the emotion out onto other people, groups, institutions, or ideas.

Repressing emotions can lead to passive-aggressive and neurotic behavior. It undermines our relationships. As Dr. John Sarno, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, and others have demonstrated, repressed emotions, especially rage, are the cause of most chronic pain and many illnesses.

2) Suppress the Emotion

We can suppress or push down negative emotions. Here, we are aware of the negative emotion at some level, but we put the majority of our attention on something else. Suppression is sometimes necessary when we’re at work or when someone needs our help. But many of us often use suppression when there’s no immediate demand for our attention.

Much of our compulsive behaviors, impulse control issues, poor habits, and aimless pursuits of pleasure are the result of suppressing negative feelings.

3) Express the Emotion

When we’re angry, some of us let the world know about it. When we’re sad, we might share our misery with others. Expressing emotions, when done maturely, can provide moderate, temporary relief. But more often, these emotions are expressed without self-control.

Expressing rage, for instance, often negatively affects our relationships and tends to feed the emotion instead of resolving it.

4) Release the Emotion

There are many methods offered in the marketplace for “releasing” emotions including the Sedona Method, Releasing Technique, Emotional Freedom Technique, and other practices of “letting go” of negative emotions.

These methods all have some therapeutic value when used appropriately. If you have no means of working effectively with negative emotions, any technique is better than none. I’ve worked extensively with many of these methods with varying results. But I believe they are less valuable than how they are marketed to us.

Here’s why: The goal of these methods is to “remove” the emotion, but in my experience, if we’re not conscious of the source or trigger of the emotion, we can’t “remove” it. My observation is that these methods trick our minds into believing we’ve “released the emotion,” when we’ve just created another way of repressing or suppressing them. That is, releasing can quickly become a deceptive form of dissociation where we separate ourselves from the emotion instead of integrating it.

5) Transmute the Emotion

A fifth way is a more conscious approach. Here, by developing self-awareness skills, an individual seeks to consciously work with the emotions to process through and unlock the energy they contain.

Instead of being drained by emotions, we build our energy reserves by breaking down the resistance around them. This method isn’t always applicable, but it’s still useful to learn.

Emotional Awareness Exercise: How to Transmute Negative Emotions into Positive Energy

Here’s a five-step emotional awareness exercise you can use to transmute negative emotions. If used repeatedly, this process can help build emotional awareness.

Step 1: Pause and Find Your Center

The faster we move through life, the less we feel. As we slow down, pausing occasionally, we can “stop and see” what’s going on.

The more you can root yourself in your Center, the more easily and readily emotions will bubble to the surface. With these emotions, you’ll often see images and memories (perhaps from childhood) where you originally experienced these emotions.

Let’s say you’ve done this and you’re aware of a specific negative emotion.

Step 2: Tune in to Your Body

Tune in to the feeling state in your body. What is the feeling state? (Anger, sadness, frustration, fear, grief, depression, or shame.)

Where exactly are you experiencing it in your body? (Head, throat, chest, gut, feet, or multiple locations.)

How does it feel? (Hard, soft, cool, hot, sticky, pulsating, vibrating, or heavy.)

Focus your attention on the physical sensations and the overall feeling. Allow the feelings and sensations to be as they are, welcoming the feelings and embracing them with full awareness.

Step 3: Relax All Judgments

We tend to judge our feelings. I shouldn’t feel like this, we might say to ourselves.

Relax this tendency to judge or react to the emotion. Just be with whatever you’re feeling.

Take full responsibility for the emotions. Notice that the emotional energy is arising within you, instead of happening to you. As long as you hold someone or something else as the source of your emotions (“his actions are making me feel this way”), you’ll have limited resources to process it.

For the moment, relax your relationship with the person or object if the feeling is about someone or something.

Step 4: Allow the Emotional Energy to Flow

Breathe deeply from your belly. Take slow, steady, deep breaths, allowing the emotional energy to flow freely through you.

While consciously breathing, observe how your sensorial and feeling experience changes as the emotional energy moves through you.

Keep paying attention to the emotion in a relaxed, centered space. This alone can be highly insightful for cultivating emotional awareness.

Step 5: Experience the Liberated Emotional Energy

After a while, the raw energy of the emotion is set free. Here, you may observe another negative emotion hidden behind it (“blending”); in this case, go through the process from the beginning.

But often, you’ll experience the unobstructed positive energy (or neutrality) from this transmutation process. You will feel more open, lighter, liberated, and free.

Exercises to Improve Your Emotional Awareness

Putting together everything we discussed above, here are five sets of exercises to improve your emotional awareness:

1: Change Your Orientation Toward Experiencing Emotions

The first step to developing your emotional awareness is to examine your orientation or attitude toward emotions—especially negative ones.

If you often try to avoid paying attention to your feelings, you probably have a mindset that supports this behavioral pattern. Change your mindset and your orientation towards emotions changes as well.

Emotions are just data. They represent information that informs our life experiences. Review the section above, “Create a New Orientation Toward Emotions.”

2: Address Your Trauma

If you’re feeling emotionally numb, it’s instructive to address your trauma. That is, find ways to unlock the emotional (energetic) blockage within your body.

See this guide on how to release repressed emotions for specific exercises.

3: Improve Your Body-Mind Connection

This step is an ongoing process. The more you bring your awareness (mind) into your body, the more your emotional awareness will come alive.

As you improve your body-mind integration, you will naturally access your emotional field that can inform your actions and decisions—without being ruled by your emotions. Qigong and yoga are commonly used for this function.

See this guide on self-awareness activities for over 15 different exercises.

4: Cultivate the Inner Observer

Your ability to stay present with your emotions is a function of how centered you are. When you hold to the Center, you can experience any emotion without being overwhelmed by them.

See this guide on seated meditation postures and how to center yourself for clarity.

But keep in mind that meditation alone will not improve your emotional awareness. Meditation helps you cultivate attention. That attention must then be focused on your emotional landscape to support the development of emotional awareness.

5: Get Comfortable Transmutating Negative Emotions

The above 5-step emotional awareness exercise provides one method for working with negative emotions. Remember that emotional awareness is ultimately a skill. Applying this method with increasing frequency will help you begin building this skill.

It’s not a matter of “getting it right” every time. Many folks get frustrated when they fail to transmute their emotions. However, failure is an integral part of the four stages of learning.

The more you work with this exercise in conjunction with the other principles and methods we discussed above, the more competence you’ll build with emotional awareness.

Good luck!