Emotional Intelligence as a Kind Rebirth
When we speak of emotional intelligence, what is commonly referred is the skill allowing us to recognize, understand, and manage our emotions. In other words, it’s a term meaning the ability to manage our feelings. While smarter people than me would tell you that it stems from our past and how we have developed survival skills which were developed through experience, in the Kind Rebirths space, it begins from a slightly different place. Rather than looking backward in order to let past trauma and wounds shape our future, we say it begins in our willingness to stay in the moment despite what we have gone through.
What does it mean to stay in the present? It means not rushing to attach or assign labels to the things that hurt or have scarred us. Rather than rushing to fix it or explain how and why it occurred, it is important to use an intelligence that develops through attention and awareness than from deliberate efforts to bottle it, to identify and claim it. For instance, and this is something we have all gone through at some point in our lives, I’d bet – romantic relationships gone bad. In your past, suppose your partner used unkind words to you. And those words took shape and you began to internalize and in some respects they became self-fulfilling. It shows up as damaged baggage that you bring to your next relationship, which inevitably crashes because maybe you haven’t learned to separate yourself from that past relationship and realizing that that old you is not who you truly are. In fact, you were never that until it happened. All of this to say, when we slow down enough to live in the moment, we can actually begin to notice what has happened to us and inside of us, thus we begin to return to who we are. In effect, we are creating a moment of Kind Rebirths for ourselves.
Kind Rebirths understands that emotions are often relational. That is, it includes how we relate to others. As we carry that baggage forward, our body and minds respond by developing protective shields that seemingly override our pain and discomfort in order to maintain a normal existence. Whether it’s us pretending that we are fine but actually bottling up our emotions or if we disguise hiding pain as normalcy, over time, our survival skills soar, but our self-knowledge diminishes.
In this context, emotional intelligence is the pause and break we need before reacting. Anger and pain often point to areas inside of ourselves that have been ignored. Combining our emotional intelligence with awareness and attention brings these revelations into sight.
Becoming aware of these instances or others that have haunted us are not easily resolved. I can attest to that. I find new things in my own life that emerge unexpectedly, but fortunately, what we discuss here doesn’t require one to be perfect. It requires us to be honest. It requires us to pay attention to these normalcies without judgment. Learning not to interrupt these feelings in order to allow them to finish their cycle of impact on us creates just enough space to acknowledge through honesty that they are there and they do exist. Familiarizing ourselves with the space that forms from waiting to respond rather than to react creates the clarity needed to place defense and urgency behind us in our rebirth in moving forward.
Practicing to return to who once were and who we genuinely are helps us reorganize ourselves using compassion and care. Mindful awareness of our emotional intelligence in this context helps improve the language needed to resolve conflicts and problems internally without transferring them outward. Suddenly, the overwhelming becomes small.
Transformative rebirths are quiet work done within you. With it, negative emotions can be held in check while remaining in the present moment.
Stay mindful…
Rebirth
