Mapping Our Emotions

I want to share a couple of visuals/frameworks with you that help me put all these things together in a more organized way. I am a visual thinker, so this has helped me make sense of things the most, possibly. If you’re a visual thinker, this might help you a lot, too.

This part may seem a little (or a lot) out there, but see if you can give it a chance because, for me, somehow it has helped me appreciate and understand the wisdom in the Bible so much more, too. 

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

Ok, let’s start with the one you’re already familiar with, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, back from the early 1940s.

A couple things you may not know about Maslow’s theory:

• He never showed the stages as a pyramid, though he did talk about the shape based on the tipi because...

• The concept was influenced by his work with elders from the Blackfeet Nation! The Blackfoot worldview, though, says after self-actualization comes community-actualization, and finally, at the top, cultural perpetuity.

• By the end, he added a final stage, “transcendence.”

• He called the bottom four layers “deficiency needs”: esteem, friendship and love, security, and physical needs. If these "deficiency needs" are not met, the individual will feel anxious and tense. 

• The levels above esteem, he called “growth needs.” They are the needs he connected with “happiness.”

• His theory can also be modeled as waves when you look at growth over time.

Spiral Dynamics

In the last few years, I came across this new-to-me model called Spiral Dynamics. It’s a pretty big rabbit hole if you want to go down it. 

This guy named Dr. Clare Graves, a friend and contemporary of Maslow, developed it in the ’50s and ’60s as he set out to confirm Maslow’s theory (that was taking criticism because it was not grounded in science).

Maslow said Grave’s theory was better than his, but Graves died before the work was published. A guy named Don Beck and then a few others picked up the baton and finished and published variations of the work. (So you’ll see lots of subtle variations between the others who continued the work but the general ideas are pretty similar.)

The basic idea is that as individuals and societies, we all follow a similar path of development. 

This theory contends that no level is better than another (like, you’re not disappointed with a toddler for having a tantrum; it’s just part of being a toddler) and that there are constructive and destructive aspects to each level. Many say that through great love or great suffering (usually suffering), we may move on to the next stage.

Until the yellow stage, people are likely to be offended or bewildered by others who are at a different level; at yellow, a person comes to appreciate all the stages.

Many believe different parts of us develop at different rates. For example, you may be at one stage in your beliefs about one thing, and at other stages about other things.

This framework alone was super helpful for me. I hope it can help you, too.

Hawkins Scale/Map of Consciousness

Ok, now I can show you the framework that helped me make sense of my emotions.

It’s really similar in a lot of ways to the spiral dynamics framework, except that it also includes the emotions we experience, which brings it down to a level of minute by minute granularity that makes it so helpful.

It’s called the Hawkins Scale because it was developed by a guy (M.D., Ph.D.) named David Hawkins. He called it a Map of Consciousness.

Hawkins spent decades performing over 250,000 muscle-test calibrations to determine a stratification of levels of consciousness or vibration that he published in his 1995 New York Times bestseller, Power vs. Force.

Personally, I’m not ready to count his muscle-testing vibrations as hard or precise science, or follow all his ideas to the number, but I find his work to be generally helpful. I see so many overlaps in his outcomes with so much of what I’ve seen in so many avenues of learning: brain waves in flow cycles, flow states, Integral Dynamics, Polyvagal Theory, other emotional frequency scales, cymatics, chakra systems, mystics, new physics, etc. 

Have you ever wondered what people (like Einstein, Tesla, and hippies) are talking about when they say “everything is frequency”? 

The idea is that everything, including emotions, is energy in motion, and there’s actually an order to them all.

Each emotion moves at a different speed or frequency. Low frequency, slower emotions are the ones that we usually describe as “negative” or “bad” feelings. Then there is a progression of emotions/frequencies as we move up into emotions that feel “positive” or “good.”

The feelings wheel I shared in Part 1 is a helpful introduction to your feelings, but once we can see them organized like this, for me, more things start to make more sense.

This map shows us that shame is the lowest, most painful, and most contracted feeling we can feel. Shame is the lowest feeling because, as Brene Brown teaches us, shame is when we believe we are bad—and therefore unlovable...but guilt is when we believe we did something bad. In this way, we can see that guilt feels better than shame.

This map helps me understand how there’s a place for everything.

For example, it’s helpful to understand that if a person is down in the emotions of shame and guilt, when they start to express anger, that’s actually huge, positive progress for them. Does that make sense?

This maps out how “pride comes before a fall” when we are moving down the scale, but when we’ve been at the bottom, pride, in the form of self-worth, is the last positive step before a major breakthrough into the higher realms.

There are so many interesting details and implications in this map, but here are a few I want to point out:

• Do you see the line between pride and courage? It seems to be the magic line between the stress/survival/rigid system and the heal/connect/agile system. When we are below that line is when we use force to try to make things happen.

• Below that 200 line is when they say disease happens in your body.

• Below 200, you are taking/consuming energy; above 200, you are producing/contributing energy.

• As we move above 200, notice how surrender fits nicely into the stages of courage, neutrality/trust, and willingness.

• Do you see forgiveness in there with acceptance?

• Notice how love is a higher state, still.

• Does this map help you make sense of the idea of spiritual or emotional bypass? We (almost always) move up and down the scale incrementally. People just can’t (usually) instantaneously jump from shame to peace, for example. If a person is feeling shame, they have to “do the work,” taking the time to “sit with their emotions” until each one flows, one by one, up the scale. 

• If you’re going to “reach” for a better feeling emotion, try accessing just one step up from where you are now. If you are going to try to leap, try reaching for courage or surrender.

• Moving up the scale feels like expansion and growth; moving down the scale feels like contraction.

• Remember that growth can feel uncomfortable, too, like when a snake outgrows and has to shed its skin.

• The higher states are also called “flow” states. It is relaxed but not in a sleepy way as much as it is a calm sharpness.

• It’s not “bad” to experience lower states. Remember, in Susan David’s TED Talk how she said, “Tough emotions are part of our contract with life.” The problem is if/when we get stuck and rigid in them. If we can stay detached enough, curious, and compassionate about them to ask them what they’re showing us, we can learn, adapt, move, heal, and flow through it.

NEXT UP:

A Story

Back to Table of Contents