A dear friend said to me the other day that once you open the door to self awareness, you are screwed!
This brought us to the question of, what is the difference between emotional intelligence and emotional maturity?
The first step to understanding this question would be understand that we firstly need to want to open the door. Self awareness is the ability to start to see the relationship between our thoughts and our emotions and what impact they have on our state of consciousness. The conscious mind has the ability to choose, while the unconscious mind experiences what has been chosen for it and in turn the body vibrates at the given frequency.
Once we begin this process and recognise the patterns, we may then begin to consciously choose which emotions we intend to experience by choosing our thoughts.
This ability or capacity to be aware of our thoughts and emotions is where emotional intelligence is obtained.
Once we have learned that we can consciously choose which thoughts we want to experience i.e. allow our unconscious mind to absorb and our body to feel, can we then begin to control how we should react to our emotions and what we are experiencing and feeling. Our emotions often allow us to be seduced by our thoughts and therefore we react uncontrollably to our emotions, like that of a young child throwing a tantrum, which is basically a child getting carried away by their emotions and inability to express themselves.
This is often looked at and labelled as immature when in fact it is a lack of emotional maturity, by no fault of the child of course. We often see this in today's society with adults who are unable to control their thoughts and emotions and lash out in rage through verbal or physical abuse or someone constantly being overwhelmed by situations.
Self awareness is the father to emotional intelligence which leads us to emotional maturity and unless we can begin to understand ourselves, can we then begin to understand the emotions of others. This will give us the ability to have empathy and compassion for others and ultimately healthier relationship with all.
Artist Duarte Victoria
