Taking Our Emotional Temperature

Your emotional temperature determines the quality of the events and conditions of your life, and you can feel the manner in which the former determines the latter.

What’s your emotional temperature?

From a typical person’s point of view, the correlation between one’s emotions and one’s experience may seem obvious.  Most people believe that their emotional temperature (essentially the way they feel about things in general) is a result of the events and conditions they encounter. 

However, my argument is that in reality it works the other way around.  Your emotions determine the quality of the events and conditions of your life, and you can feel the correlation between the two. 

 At this point, you may well ask, “Ok, that’s kind of an abstract pseudo-philosophical idea. But how would it work in my life?”

Yin and Yang: the Principle of Duality

To begin that inquiry, I suggest that we take a step back and think about how we experience the world. We can start by examining the possibility that we humans are trapped in a world view that we learned when we were young. That world view is all we know, and it has never occurred to most of us to examine it in terms of whether it serves our hopes and dreams.

This world view I’m speaking of interprets all our perceptions in terms of duality. There’s good and bad, right and wrong, hot and cold, and on and on. Without thinking about it, we give equal weight to each of those poles in terms of what we think is real. Because good is real to us, bad must be real as well.

But consider what happens when you enter a dark room. It’s not dark because somebody threw the “dark switch.” It’s dark until somebody hits the light switch. Dark doesn’t have the same quality of reality as light; dark is simply the absence of light.

Again, without thinking about it, we assume that good experiences and bad experiences are on equal footing. That assumption leads us to feel that the quality of our lives is largely random. As this thinking goes, some people are lucky enough (or educated enough, or light-skinned enough) to have predominantly good experiences, and the rest are unlucky enough (in the same vein) to have mostly bad ones.

However, I’d like to suggest that the quality of our lives does not really live in duality, as if on a thermometer measuring from cold to hot. What makes an experience good or bad is not the event itself but what we tell ourselves about it. In other words, the quality of our experience resides in our story about it. The experience itself is neither good nor bad; it’s just what it is.

For example, a hurricane is really neither good nor bad. Now, it’s certainly true that one’s experience of that hurricane can be thought of as bad. In some locations however, it delivers much-needed rain. A raging river can be destructive, but it can also be thrilling in a kayak.

We’ve learned and practiced our story for so long we’ve forgotten that it’s only a story. That story, however, is up to us. We can craft a story about our experience that makes us feel better. My mother used to point at that truth by telling me about something I wasn’t enjoying, “This too shall pass.” She was telling me that I didn’t need to feel stuck in what I thought of as a bad experience, because it wasn’t permanent. And that made me feel better.

Ok, how does our emotional temperature affect our experience?

We all know people who expect bad experiences to come their way. This expectation is often expressed these days as “life is hard,” “things are getting worse,” “we’re losing our freedom/democracy/way of life,” and the old standby, Murphy’s law: “if things can go wrong, they will.” We all suspect that those folks are most likely experiencing life that way. We also know that there are people for whom things are going really well. What makes the difference? Is it just luck?

Here’s another premise for your consideration: We are fluid beings, capable of perceiving a multiplicity of realities.  All possible configurations of the world that we could perceive actually exist in this moment, right here and now, and the one we’re experiencing right now is the one to which we are an emotional match.

I know, that statement strikes many people as hopelessly romantic, impossibly abstract, Pollyanna. Surely there isn’t any scientific basis for the idea that at a deep level we choose the reality we experience. Is there?? Well…

Quantum physics tells us that the world exists in what is called a superposition of possible states, and it doesn’t appear to us in a particular state until we actually observe it.

I have studied, in my own life, the correlation I’m speaking about, the one that connects my usual emotional state, my usual mood, to what happens. Based on my own experience, I can say the way I feel makes a difference. If I look at the world around me as a safe, friendly place, my experience tends to confirm that view of life. And, I have noticed, the reverse is also true. If I look out at the world with fear in my heart, I see unending bleakness, unfulfilled dreams, dashed hopes, and so on.

The bad news is that the world seems unyielding in its confirmation of our worst fears. The good news is that the world is equally unyielding in its confirmation of our best, practiced thoughts about what’s possible in our lives. My emotional temperature really does make a difference.

I set my emotional temperature according to my expectations.

Our emotional scale

I find that my emotional temperature stabilizes around what I call a set-point. It’s analogous to the average temperature of some location at a particular time of year. The actual temperature fluctuates around that mean or set-point from day to day.

Following this analogy, if I expect that answers to my questions will appear in right timing, if I expect things to always work out for me, my emotional set-point becomes more conducive to joyful living. When I make my average mood more expansive, more allowing, more joyful, then the quality of my experience correlates with that mood shift. I can feel that shift and watch the circumstances of my life shifting as well. And as a result, I can feel myself coming more and more into my own as a creative being for whom life is designed to be satisfying.

How does our emotional temperature determine the quality of our experience? The answer lies in the story we each tell about our lives. There is no darkness in life. There is only dis-allowing the light. This I believe with all my heart.