Emotional intelligence is how well we identify and manage our own emotions and react to the emotions of others. It’s the understanding of how those emotions shape our thoughts and actions, so that we can have greater control over our behavior and develop the skills to manage ourselves more effectively.
Becoming more emotionally aware allows us to grow and gain a deeper understanding of who we are, enabling us to communicate better with others and build stronger relationships.
Meditation can significantly enhance emotional intelligence by cultivating self-awareness. It allows us to better recognize and manage our emotions as well as understand and respond appropriately to the emotions of others. As a result, it improves our ability to navigate interpersonal relationships effectively.
But how does this happen:
When we meditate, we achieve a state known as thoughtless awareness. Research has shown that the average person has about 50000 thoughts each day. Each of these thoughts produce chemicals in our brain that can trigger reactions felt throughout our body. So, these thoughts dictate how we feel every moment of every single day. Thoughts usually arise from our past or the future, from our internal reactions, that are based on our ego and conditionings. During the practice of Sahaja Yoga meditation, we go beyond our mind, beyond our thoughts and learn to be in the present.
By being in the present moment during meditation, we become more attuned to our internal states, witnessing subtle shifts in our emotions as they arise. Meditation thus heightens our self-awareness.
Meditation enables us to take a pause, so that we can have the overall view of the situation. A reaction is an immediate and often impulsive response to a situation, without taking the time to fully process or consider the consequences. It is often driven by emotion, rather than reason or logic. Through the practice of meditation, we learn to respond in a thoughtful and deliberate manner.
Actively witnessing emotions during meditation helps to detach from them and lessens our reactions. This can lessen the intensity of strong emotional responses, allowing for a more balanced reaction to situations.
Meditation can cultivate the feelings of kindness and warmth. It can foster empathy and compassion towards oneself and others, enhancing interpersonal skills.
We know that stress can often cloud our judgment and hinder effective emotional responses. Meditation helps reduce our stress levels and thereby contributes to better emotional regulation.
During meditation we can put our attention on our breathing. While taking slow full breaths, we can observe the thoughts and emotions as they arise, without judgment, simply noting them as they pass, and we gradually enter that witness state, when we are thoughtless.
Is there a scientific basis of all this?
Everything we perceive with our five senses enters the base of our brain and must travel to the forehead (the frontal lobe) where rational, logical thinking takes place. Before reaching there, these signals must first pass through the limbic area where all the emotions are produced. This ensures that we experience things emotionally before our reasoning kicks in. The communication between our emotional and rational brains (limbic area and frontal lobe) is the physical source of emotional intelligence.
Regular meditation can therefore improve our emotional intelligence by strengthening the neural pathways in our brain responsible for emotional processing and regulation. Neuroplasticity is the ability of neurons to modify the strength of existing synapses, as well as form new synaptic connections. Various scientific studies using functional MRI show clear neuroplastic changes in regions of the brain associated with attention, emotion regulation, self-awareness, empathy and stress management. One typical example of this is the enhanced ability to pause before reacting. A person acting on 'auto-pilot' might immediately react to a situation, whereas another one who has higher self-regulation skills (via meditation) will react with awareness and presence, not letting themselves be triggered.
Lastly, Sahaja Yoga meditation, activates the parasympathetic nervous system, that has an overall calming effect on our being. It lowers our heart rate, blood pressure and stress levels. Eventually this state of mental silence leads to feelings of inner peace, of deep relaxation, of enhanced alertness, joy and detachment.
In conclusion, through regular meditation, we can increase our self-awareness by becoming more aware of our inner state and understanding how emotions affect behavior. Additionally, meditation can improve social awareness by cultivating an open and empathetic attitude towards others. Lastly, it can help develop social skills such as listening, speaking, collaborating, and negotiating. All these benefits can help us communicate more effectively with difficult people and build rapport and trust with them.
Shri Mataji has spoken at length about the importance of emotional intelligence. Here is an excerpt from one of her talks …
“I talked to you about the emotional intelligence. That is what we should try to imbibe. Emotional intelligence, that means the intelligence that is based on emotions. Unless and until we become emotionally intelligent, our society cannot work. In an emotional intelligence, you care, and you enjoy caring. You do everything for others with a great emotional understanding. Not for one person, but for everyone you must be emotionally intelligent.
In collectivity, we enjoy doing things for others. This emotional intelligence has to be brought in our life. In our pattern that we have, are we emotionally intelligent or we are just intelligent or emotional? Both latter things are wrong.If you are just intelligent, you can become a very dry person. You will always try to preserve yourself away from the collectivity. And if you are just emotional, you’ll be attached to only one person, for no rhyme or reason. Why? Why are you attached to one person? Why you bothered about one person only?
All such people fall into such terrible play. In the politics you have seen now, people try to help their own sons and own daughters. We Indians have suffered a lot with this kind of an emotional attachment.
So, according to ethics, emotional intelligence is the highest quality, by which you give to others, you care for others, for everyone and you become very, very collective. I am just a woman and just a mother, but what I have is really the emotional intelligence, ocean of it, and from that I know about everyone, I understand everyone. And all this work has been done because of that quality in my head. I’m not attached to one person or to one style. Whatever you say, I can understand, because I am at a level where I can understand everything that you are doing.
To achieve that, you should try to develop emotional intelligence. Joy of life is only in the emotional intelligence. If you don’t have that, it becomes very dry. Life becomes very odd, unbearable, horrible and even the family gets broken, if there is no emotional intelligence in the family. When you have the Truth with you, the light of the Truth, the source of the Truth, the strength of the Truth, you become emotionally intelligent. We should remember this point, that: 'Are we having the emotional intelligence when we are trying to talk?' If you have that emotional intelligence, everybody will listen to you. You have to send waves of emotional intelligence. You have to send love all over the world. You have to show how you can, with love, win over everyone.“ [Canajoharie, NY, June 20, 1999]
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