Living As Soul: From Mind to Wisdom

Session 2: Emotions

Channeled by John McCurdy on May 3, 2022

This transcript has been edited from the original recording to ensure that the intended meaning is conveyed as clearly as possible.

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I am that I am.

Master John of Magical Service!

Welcome back, dear friend, to our class about the mind, about emotions, and about your knowing.

Ahh…

This is a difficult subject for John to channel. Because, you see, he has one of these very, very strong minds, and we are talking about the mind. And we are using the mind to translate the feelings, the knowing, that John is receiving, into words.

Oh, it took him a while to get to this particular channel, because he felt that the last one about the mind was so deep and profound. It affected him on a deep level, and so his mind got all busy thinking about what this message might be about. He knew it was going to be about emotions, but what will we say? His mind went into fear. “Will I be able to open up enough,” he thought, “to let this through?”

Dear mind, just relax. Take a deep breath. This is not your job. You are just a translator right now, and you are good at that. So just let it happen.

But you see, there are all these emotions, emotions of fear. “What if I get it wrong? What if I’m just making this up?”

Dear mind, you cannot make anything up. It isn’t possible. And, you cannot get it wrong.

Mmm…

So, let’s talk about emotions.

There are the basic emotions: happy, sad, afraid, angry, and things like that, and then there are so many variations. And like we said in our last lesson, even pain itself is a kind of emotion, something that is made up by the mind.

Ha! Yes, we just said you can’t make things up, dear mind. But, well, that is the way of words, which are also of the mind. There is always the AND: this is true, AND its opposite is true, or its seeming opposite.

You see, emotions are the gravity—or, we like the word inertia better—they are the inertia that keep you stuck in your strong mind. Or even in the weak minds, if there is such a thing. Emotions are the inertia that keep you stuck there.

They are a brilliant creation. A brilliant, brilliant creation! Emotions, oh, they bring a whole lot of sensuality to the human experience, and they are the chief tool that the mind uses to keep you distracted from yourself, from your soul.

Hmm…

And as some of you have already found out, when you come home to you, when you allow the I Am, the home within you, it begins to neutralize the emotions.

Oh, the human gets a little scared about that. It is so used to the emotions. It thinks, “What will I do without them? It sounds boring. It sounds flat and dull.”

Dear friends, it isn’t. There is something that is so much more sensual than the emotions, so much more colorful, so much more free than the emotions.

We often talk about feeling. Because, you see, your knowing is here for you now. The knowing, and the wisdom of the soul, is here for you, but it comes in feelings.

Feelings are sensations. But the mind thinks, “Feelings! Oh, that means emotions. Feelings like happy or sad.”

No, those are not feelings. They are emotions.

What is the difference? Well, you could say that a feeling is a simple sensation. It can be a physical sensation, like if someone pinches you, you feel the sensation of the flesh being crushed. Or it can be an energy sensation, just an impression inside you or in your heart. It’s hard to describe in words, because words come from mind and feelings do not come from the mind.

Emotions, on the other hand, are reactions to sensations. You could say that an emotion is an evaluation of a sensation.

Hmm…

Emotions—well, you see, something happens in your life and you receive a sensation. It could come through your eyes, from seeing something happen, for that is a sensation. The mind takes that and evaluates it, and then it determines, based upon that evaluation, what emotion to give you.

And oh, emotions are very powerful, because there is a whole mechanism inside of you in, in your body, that your mind uses. Let’s say that someone pinches you. Oh, your mind reacts and says, “That was bad. I need to get angry! I need to say ouch! I need to feel pain!” And then it floods your body with chemicals, with drugs, to reinforce that feeling, and you find yourself angry. You find it to be a physical sensation in your body—you are so angry! Or a little angry, or whatever the situation may be—and the mind fills your body with drugs that trigger the sensations that go with anger.

In a certain sense, you could say they are fake sensations. It is very real experience, but these sensations are, well, they are made up.

Hmm…

Yes, allow the contradictions. That is something the mind has a hard time with. The mind says, “If this over here is true, then that over there has to be false.” But that is not how life is.

So, you feel a sensation and you have a reaction, and you think that reaction is real. Well, it is a real experience, but it is entirely dependent upon how your mind evaluates what happened.

Imagine that somebody comes along and gently caresses your cheek. Well, depending on who it is, your mind can react with deep pleasure, with feelings of love. If it is someone you care about and whom you like to be touched by, your mind can fill you with feelings—with the chemicals and drugs—of love, of feeling in love, and of of joy and happiness.

But if it is someone else, someone that you don’t like or that simply doesn’t have the right to touch you in that way, well, your mind can react with outrage. It can create sensations of pain and anger, all from exactly the same sensation.

Two completely and totally different experiences, all from exactly the same sensation.

If someone comes along and tells you that you are crazy, or that you are mean and nasty, or if they insult you in some other way, well, once again, depending on who it is and on the situation, your mind can react in outrage and flood your body with the chemicals and the drugs that support and reinforce that outrage. You feel hurt. You feel ashamed. And it is all just a bunch of emotions.

In another situation, a person could say those exact same words to you, and it would make you laugh. Perhaps they intended it as a joke. Perhaps it is someone whose opinion you don’t care about, and you know that what they say doesn’t have anything to do with you. Then you just laugh.

Entirely different emotions, responding to the same sensation.

And yes, hearing someone say something to you is a sensation. It is an incoming stimulus, you could say. It is a simple sensation of air moving. It moves membranes in your ear and you hear a sound, and that is a sensation. And depending on what that sensation means to you, on how your mind evaluates it—oh, another possibility is that someone speaks a different language and they might call you the most evil, vile thing on the planet. But you don’t know what they are saying, and so you just smile. You feel nothing by way of emotions, because you don’t even know what they are saying.

People go around complaining because, “Well, that person hurt me!”

No, that person just said something. You hurt yourself by how you evaluated what they said!

They did not hurt you. If anything, they hurt themselves, because when you throw dirt at someone it tends to mostly come back on you. But they did not hurt you! It was your mind, your evaluation, your interpretation, the meaning you gave to what they said, that hurt you.

Now, there is the other side of emotions. The happiness. Oh, your lover comes to you and touches you and says sweet things to you, and you feel joy. Your mind evaluates this as such a beautiful, amazing thing. You look in their eyes and you feel such joy, such peace, such beauty, and your mind floods your body with the chemicals, the drugs of joy and happiness, of feeling in love. And that is a beautiful experience!

But there is always the other side of it. If that person then says something that makes you doubt their love—it can be completely innocent, like something pops out of their mouth that makes your mind question if they really love you or not—and suddenly that beautiful experience turns into an inner hell. Suddenly you are in doubt. Suddenly you are in pain. Literal, physical pain.

Well, the pain is not anything real in your body. It is just created by the drugs that your mind creates.

Oh, your mind is the biggest drug factory in the universe! It has a whole arsenal of drugs that it can create in an instant and send them out through your body to create all these physical sensations.

So, there are the beautiful emotions of happiness and joy, and there is always, always the flip side, the other side. And that is the problem, even with the beautiful emotions. They can instantly turn into pain and misery, just depending upon how your mind evaluates what happened.

Well, there is another kind of joy, another kind of pleasure, you could say, that comes with your knowing. That comes with you are I Am, your divinity.

Hmm…

These emotions keep you stuck.

Your knowing is soft and gentle. It’s a feeling. It’s a sensation. And in comparison, your emotions are like bright neon flashing lights. And they are exactly how your mind does its job, the job you gave it eons ago, of keeping you distracted from your soul and from anything outside of the human experience.

These emotions are intense. They are engaging. They affect your whole body.

These drugs that your mind sends out into your body are powerful. They are addictive. Oh, very, very addictive! Even the negative ones. They are even more addictive than the so-called positive ones.

A better way to say it is, the ones that you like. For there are no positive or negative emotions. There are simply the ones you like and the ones you don’t like, and the ones you don’t like are even more addictive than the ones you do like.

That is why people get stuck in their misery and in their miserable creations, because they become dependent on those feelings and on those sensations of misery in their body. It is a drug, and it is addictive. It is so intense that when they don’t have it, they feel like something is wrong. If they are not angry, there must be something wrong. They must not be alive. It scares them, and so they generate more anger.

Mmm…

Very, very powerful experiences, these emotions! And they keep you stuck here.

They have served you so well! Oh, they have brought so much drama to your experience on Earth! You think drama is a bad thing, but it is exactly what got you to this point. It made this experience so intense, so vibrant, so colorful that it helped you to find the answer to, Who am I? And that is what this has all been about.

Oh, but now you have come to the end of the game, to the final level. Now you are transforming, and all those emotions keep you distracted from who you really are. Whether they are pleasurable or painful, they distract you. They keep you stuck in your mind. They keep you limited. They scare you into not opening up. Even the pleasurable emotions.

The mind goes, “Why would I want to lose this?” Well, then something happens, and the next moment you are in misery, because you are so addicted to those emotions. You try so hard to hold on to that pleasurable emotion that, well, it has to break down. And then you are in misery. Then you are in terror of losing that love, or that whatever, that thing that makes you so happy. And then, well, so many times you end up losing it.

Because, you see, the energies of your life—everything you see is your own energy, and it is all responding to where your attention is. And nothing, nothing, gets more of your attention than the things that are emotional, the things that scare you, the things that hurt you. Oh, even the things that make you happy don’t get as much attention as the things that hurt. And so the energies—your energies—look at you and they see where your attention is, and they say, “I guess that’s what my creator wants more of, so that is where we serve. We’ll bring them more of that.”

And that keeps you stuck. It keeps you on this narrow little human life path, recreating the same things over and over again. Moments of joy and long periods of pain and fear and misery.

Hmm…

It gets very confusing when we talk about inner guidance, about trusting and even following your feelings, because you instantly think of emotions.

When you say the word “feeling,” the only thing most humans are aware of is their emotions. And, well, if you follow your emotions, you are going to be a very confused and very unhappy person, with a lot of chaos in your life. That’s just the way it is.

Your feelings come from your knowing, from your wisdom, and are entirely different. They are subtle. They are gentle. They are about the moment, whereas emotions are usually about the past and the future. Feelings are sensations in the moment, but most people can’t feel them because they are so blinded by their emotions.

So, what to do? Well, the thing not to do is to fight with your emotions and with your mind. That doesn’t work. That is a self-perpetuating and self-defeating power game.

You see, these emotions are aspects of you, especially the strong ones. They are parts of you that you have felt before, and you pushed them away because you didn’t like them. Or, some of them, you pulled them in close because you did like them, until they transformed into their opposite, and then you pushed them away. They are literal parts of you, and you buried them deep in your body because they were scary. They felt ugly. They felt painful.

Well, now you wonder why your body hurts so much. It is because all of those things are coming back to light. They have to for you to go forward from here, and for you to enter into your light body.

All of those aspects have to come home, and that means you get to feel them. They are going to trigger those emotions. They are going to trigger that pain in your body because, well, there is just no other way. Those part of you have to come home. You have avoided them and suppressed them for so long.

Humans have this thing about avoiding their emotions and pushing them down. They know that emotions bring chaos, so they pushed them down and try to be stoic. They try not to have them. But that just buries them, and at this point in your journey they have to come back up. They have to be felt. They have to be owned. They have to be loved. They have to be accepted.

That doesn’t mean that you allow them to control your life. They are like Children. They are acting out because they are scared and lonely. They are desperate for the attention of their parent, and that is you, so they are screaming. They are acting out.

What they need is your acceptance, your love, but not a syrupy “I love you” kind of love. It is the love that takes them in your arms and says, Welcome home, but here are the boundaries within which you can live here. You don’t get to run my life anymore. But you are part of me, a part of me that I have been ashamed of and afraid of, and I am going to let that shame and that fear go. I am going to welcome you home, because you are part of me and I cannot go forward without you.

So, you could say that your mind is an aspect of you, one of the greatest aspects. You thought it was you, but it is only a part of you. It keeps trying to convince you, to fool you, into thinking that it is you. It is an interesting game that it plays with itself.

Some of you come to us and say, “How can I get out of my mind? How can I get rid of my mind? It’s driving me crazy!”

Well, the only way out of anything is in. It is time to hug your mind. But it is also time to put boundaries on your mind. It is time to tell your mind what are the parameters of its continued existence as a part of you.

Sometimes someone comes to John in a private channel and says to their soul, “I am so scared to do something!”

Well, we have to explain that there is only one way out of fear, and that is to make a choice to feel the fear and walk through it, to do it anyway, to do what you know you need to do, even though you are afraid.

So, your mind comes to you with all of these arguments. Oh, it feels the knowing coming in. It feels the sensations, and it freaks out because they don’t make any sense to it. They don’t fit within its very limited version of reality, and so it argues.

You feel an impulse to do something, but that something doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with solving the problems that your mind is so desperate to solve, and so your mind argues with it. It says, “That’s crazy! That doesn’t make any sense!”

And the typical human, they hear that and say, “Oh, okay, so what do I do, mind?” And then they go running off down another rabbit hole, trying to solve the mind’s problems. It doesn’t work. It just creates more emotions.

It is time to tell your mind that it is not allowed to do that anymore.

Hmm…

Some of you say, “How can I tell my mind that? That’s mean!”

No. It is how you treat a child with love. A child needs boundaries. A child thrives when they have clear and reasonable boundaries, and without boundaries, the child gets confused. It  gets scared. It doesn’t thrive.

Well, your mind is your child. You created it! And we are not here to uncreate it. It has served you way too well for that. It is beautiful creation, but it is time for it to realize who the parent is. Or who the boss is, as the saying goes.

It is time to talk to your mind and to give it boundaries: No, mind, you are not allowed any longer to run down those rabbit holes.

Oh, it will try, and you just keep bringing it back. You keep enforcing those boundaries. Gently, lovingly, with a hug, but, Dear mind, you do not get to run my life with your fear anymore! You do not get to make up all these stories about what is happening and fill me with all these drugs!

You don’t fight with your mind, you just gently bring it back to the truth of you. You know what the truth is. You are your soul. You can talk to your mind as your soul, and remind it of the truth.

If there is something that you are afraid of, remind your mind of the truth that you know of the situation. You can follow the mind down that rabbit hole of fear and all of its reasons and all of its arguments, or you can take a deep breath and say, No, mind. This is the truth that I know, that my soul knows.

And the minute you claim that, you will know the truth and the words that come out of your mouth—even if it is within your own mind—will be the truth.

But yes, it is time to stop living as your mind. It is time to tell your mind, to remind your mind constantly, of the real truth: I exist. I am my soul. I have my wisdom now, and that is where I choose to live.

If you feel pain in your body, well, you can follow your mind down the rabbit hole of that pain into evaluating and imagining all the things that could be wrong with you. Or you can say, Dear mind, this is just the process of allowing Home to come in.

Oh, the pain isn’t going to go away in an instant, usually. But it becomes manageable, and at some point it will go away, because your mind wants to let go of it. It wants this next step. It wants it more than anything! But this job of distracting you, of protecting you—though it never really was much protection and it often created the very things it was afraid of—is such a habit for your mind. It doesn’t know how else to exist, so you have to teach it.

You have to teach it to relax, to take a breath, to come back to the truth. You always know in the moment what the real truth is, but most of the time you are so distracted by your mind’s emotions that you get all confused. But you still know.

So, come back to the knowing. Remind your mind of what you know, of what the truth is. Your mind will come along, but you do have to be firm with it.

Yes, you do have to be firm with your mind. You have to remind it that YOU are the one in charge now, not the mind. Your soul, your divinity, your wisdom, is here now, and this is where you take ownership of it. You say, Dear mind, we are living from a different place now, and you have to step back.

It will, because you are consciousness and whatever you choose is what has to happen. But you have to be clear.

So many of you are so timid with your mind. You think you have to please it. You think you have to be gentle with it. Well, gentle isn’t a bad thing. It’s a good thing, but you think you have to coddle your mind, to appease it, to make it feel better. And oh, what a trap that is!

Whether it is yourself or someone else, humans get so caught up in making people feel better. They focus on the people around them, and really, they are trying to make themselves feel better. And there is no bigger trap, in all of human existence, than trying to make someone feel better! Including yourself.

No. Instead, feel what you feel. Allow the feeling. And allow them to have their feelings, or their emotions, or whatever it is.

You see, you have these emotions, and you are starting to recognize that you don’t need them anymore, so you try to get rid of them. You try to not have them. You try to not to think all these scary thoughts in your mind, and it doesn’t work. It’s just a battle with yourself. Instead, have the feelings. When you feel an emotion, take a moment and breathe it in.

Not into some dark hole somewhere to get rid of it. You breathe it into your heart. You feel it. You go into it. Not to wallow in it, not to keep making up the story, but to feel it.

You see, every emotion has a story behind it, and most of the time, you get yourself sucked into that story and you continue it. You continue imagining it and making it up, talking about it in your mind and even with other people, and it just makes it bigger. No. Instead, just stop the words. Stop the words, and feel the sensations. Feel the feelings, and the emotions.

Sometimes John feels something and his mind goes, “Oh, I need to feel this! I need to feel this! I need to feel this! I need to feel this!” and it turns into another game. No, just stop.

Notice what you feel.

Bring your awareness, your simple, pure awareness, to what you feel, to what is happening in your body right now.

Bring your presence into your body.

Bring your presence into whatever it is that you are feeling in your body.

Don’t evaluate it, for that is just the mind.

As we said in our class on creation, if it is words, it is your mind. So let all the words go.

Simply bring your presence, without any story, into your body.

And you will find that presence is your I Am. It is your consciousness. And you will find that when you bring your consciousness, your presence, into your body, it neutralizes the emotions. You start to see through the story.

Oh, your mind will start arguing with itself: “I don’t need to have that story!”

Well, just let go of the words.

Be in your presence.

Bring your presence into you, into your body, into your mind.

Breathe in those feelings, those emotions, those stories.

Just breathe them into your heart.

Don’t try to get rid of them. They are parts of you and you cannot get rid of them.

But you can welcome them home, with boundaries. They no longer get to run your life, but they do get to be loved. They get to be held and comforted.

But they do not get to run your life.

Your mind does not get to keep running all those stories.

You don’t shame it when it does, you simply remind it to stop.

Let the words go.

Let the stories go.

It’s not easy at first, for it is such a habit.

It’s difficult to be firm with your mind, but it gets easier. And it sets you free.

Once again, it is not the human’s job to do any of this. It is your soul’s job, and it is happening.

It is happening already! Otherwise, you would not be hearing this message.

This message is not about getting out of the emotions. It is about seeing through them. It is about bringing your consciousness to them, because then they dissolve away.

When you bring consciousness to your mind you begin to see through its stories, and to see how they are just more power games, and they begin to dissolve away.

Your mind feels your presence and it starts to relax, because that is what it wants more than anything. That is what it has been fighting for, for so long.

Oh, your mind has missed your soul! You gave it the job of keeping you human, of hiding your soul from you, and it did its job with dedication and passion. But oh, it missed your soul so much! It missed your divinity. It missed you.

So bring your presence to it.

Don’t let it play the games. When you remember, just remind it of the truth.

You know the truth. Do not ask us, “What is the truth to tell my mind?”

You know what it is!

Feel it inside of you. The truth of you, the truth of your I Am.

It is right there. You know it. The wisdom. Tell it to your mind, and it will relax.

It will feel that light, and it will come home. Because that is what it wants, more than anything.

It wants your presence.

Hmm…

Take some time. Allow yourself to have the time you need to integrate this message. Don’t come back to the next message for at least a few hours. Better yet, wait until tomorrow.

Feel this message.

Feel into your emotions.

Feel into the stories that are behind them.

Every emotion has a story, so feel into those stories.

Don’t shame them, don’t fight with them. Just be present with them.

Bring your presence into them, and into your body and into you. And discover what you feel.

Be with what you feel.

Notice the difference between a sensation or an input, and an emotion.

Notice how your mind evaluates everything, and creates your emotions based upon that evaluation.

Notice how you can change the emotion simply by changing the evaluation of whatever happened.

Don’t work too hard at that or you’ll end up in another mind game, but just be in your presence with you, with all these parts of you.

You see, when you bring your presence to your mind, your mind starts to remember, “Oh yes, I am not you. You are my creator!”

And suddenly, it can relax. It can let go of all that responsibility of taking care of you, and then it will start to get so much quieter. It will stop fighting with you, and it will start to make space in your awareness for your knowing.

So, be with these feelings. Whatever came up during this message, just be with it.

Take some time to let it integrate. Don’t dive into the next message immediately, because you will miss a lot of what there is for you in this message. Take some time to be with it, and then come back to our next message about the knowing. The knowing that you are.

And so it is.

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