Mastering Emotions — How Dreaming Can Help You be a Better Leader
“That made me so mad!”
How many times a day do we open an email, receive a bill, hear about a delay in a project, or have a conflict with a partner or someone at work and feel a jolt of emotion?
Situations happen, and often several times a day — the human 24-hour journey is a roller coaster of fear, happiness, boredom, distraction, joy, anger, anticipation, and all the other fine-tuned emotions and feelings that characterize our experience. The tendency is to think that we ride that roller coaster; in fact, we control it.
Situations happen, but how we choose to respond to them is up to us. Emotions and feelings are energy — they come from our body’s reaction to something that is happening.
Think of it like this: we ARE energy, and that energy is contained within, and expressed by, our body. If a bear steps in front of us, let’s say, that energy pulls back, condenses, prepares us for movement — e.g running like crazy in the other direction. That whole experience we call “fear”. Fear is not a “thing”; rather, it’s the channeling of our body’s energy in a specific way for a specific end. Maybe that energy instead pushes outward in its condensing and preparation for movement, and we box the bear in the nose — we call that “anger”. Again, this is just energy that we experience in a specific way and give a specific name.
What if we ignore the bear, telling ourselves there’s no problem with a big bear standing in front of us, we’ll just ‘live with it’? Squashing those energies — ignoring the bear — further condenses them. It’s like kinking a garden hose on both ends — the energy builds and builds and the more we squash it the more contracted the experience until our energy gets tangled and knotted. We give this names like chronic tension, anxiety, depression, guilt.
There’s good news. Guess what else is energy: feelings. What we experience as creativity, compassion, lovingkindness, generosity, joy, peace, serenity are all also movements of our same body energy. The difference is that with feelings our energy is flowing smoothly and rhythmically. Anger and fear, remember, are the condensing of energies to create movement. Smoothed out and flowing naturally is — or should be — home base.
Knowing that energy is just energy, and that whether we experience emotion or feeling is a matter of where and how we channel that energy, puts us in control of the roller coaster. At the first rise of body movement — condensing, contracting — we can choose to channel our energy toward creativity, curiosity, listening. If we do, everything changes. What may have been the start of conflict can easily resolve before coming to a head because we have full creative resources to deal with it.
Where does the dreaming come in?
Far too often we don’t know what we are experiencing. Situation after situation piles up each day, our roller-coaster jerking and winding and grinding up and crashing down so frequently that we often don’t take time to deal with each specific thing. There’s also those big bears that we tell ourselves we can just live with and try to ignore. Like this, we carry tangled and knotted energy from one meeting to the next, one encounter to another, like noisy cans tied to our shoes, adding disturbance to every subsequent moment. At this point everything is noisy and tangled up and… where did it start?
Dreams show us precisely the state of our body energy — where it is tangled, and where it is flowing. If tangled, we have a nightmare. Or, maybe we have a clear dream that shows us both the tangle and the opportunity to release it and return to flow. If purely flowing we’ll have a great dream.
Dream are both specific and, if there is a tangle to deal with or an opportunity to take, they are diagnostic. Meaning, for example, we won’t have a nightmare that is merely an obtuse ‘horrible feeling’; rather, the dream will show, in image and emotion, precisely the tangle and what emotion we are ascribing to it.
For example, dreaming of driving in a boxed-in canyon of hard, red rock, which is increasingly narrowing until there’s no way out and ends in a sheer rock wall. This is an anger dream — the hard, red, narrow is showing, in image and the way this is experienced, the constricting, hot, red sensation of hardened energy that we call anger. By diagnostic, it is showing that a reverse is needed: there’s no way to continue forward (hitting a wall, literally). Instead, a reversal of the contraction, turning 180 degrees, will yield an opening and a new, expansive movement.
If we pay attention to our dreams, and the emotional, feeling, and physical experience they provoke in us, we can wake to a new awareness of what, precisely, is the ‘noisy’ tangle that is curtailing our ability to be free-flowing, creative, and responsive in our interactions. After that, it’s up to us to then effect the ‘prescription’ of the dream, such as making the 180 degree turn away from the hard rock wall to open back out into response.
Learning to master our emotions is part of every person’s inner maturation. It’s an imperative skill for a leader. As such this, is an integral part of the DYW Leadership program at the Institute for Dreaming and Imagery. In particular, we teach a specific rubric for shifting from emotion to feeling called The Life Plan.
Problems are generally simple, and solutions simple — it’s us who complicate things, and usually through our emotional reactions. Learning to channel our emotions from reaction to response, from entanglement to free-flowing fluidity, keeps us in a space of creative problem-solving, where we can nimbly lead teams through the many snares and challenges of every day.
