In our work as holistic coaches and trainers, we continue to be amazed and inspired by the way everything is connected. Within each of us, a beautiful wholeness – an integration of the body, emotions, mind, and spirit – is occurring as our awareness of our true identities emerges.
We all want to create the best life ever and here’s the key. Everything in our inner and outer experience is significant in relation to the big picture of who we really are: wonderful spiritual beings who are here for a reason, each with dreams and unique gifts to share.
Isn’t the Thought of Creating the Best Life Ever Inspiring?
The transformational potential of your emotional and spiritual intelligence is a key factor in the quality of your life. This potential also applies to your intelligence at the mental and even physical levels of our being.
Exploring these vast inner resources has taken us into new territories and higher heights that have transformed countless lives. With a holistic approach, we’ve seen that you can become aware of how the body, emotions, mind, and spirit contain pieces of the puzzle of who you are and why you are here.
Awareness is a key for creating our best life and every part of your being can support you in wonderful ways when you learn how to access our true intelligence and potential. Holistic Model of Spiritual, Mental, Emotional and Physical Intelligence
Here is an overview of the potential that exists at each level. As you read about them, the descriptions can take you on a journey into each aspect of our wholeness.
Spiritual Intelligence
The spiritual level is the deepest level. It relates to the way we perceive ourselves, which is the depth of our being. Think about it – when you feel good about yourself and where you are going, life is good.
In essence, the spiritual journey essentially involves a transformation of the way we perceive ourselves from a place of being limited physical beings to magnificent spiritual beings. As Joseph Rain suggested:
“Your whole world, and everything you know and possess, arises from, and is dependent upon, your experience of who you are.”
Spiritual intelligence focuses on awareness of this key distinction. When we judge ourselves as inadequate, flawed, unworthy, or undeserving of all the blessings life can bring, we block ourselves from the spiritual wisdom that flows naturally through our hearts and souls.
As we clear these blocks, we connect more and more deeply with our true divine nature, which resides most deeply in our hearts. Our hearts open, we feel better about ourselves and we appreciate our unique gifts. This opens us to feeling better about our possibilities in life, which takes us to mental intelligence.
Mental Intelligence
Most of us relate mental intelligence to our IQ, along with abilities like remembering things and solving math problems. While all of this is true, there is more. Energetically, mental intelligence goes a step further into our resourcefulness.
The mental level relates to our perception of our possibilities in life. It is externally oriented, focusing on what is happening in the outer world. Our mental perspective follows our spiritual perspective, focusing on our beliefs and attitudes. When we feel bad about ourselves spiritually, we feel correspondingly bad about our possibilities. Taking it a step further, we also feel correspondingly bad emotionally.
John Paul Warren put it this way:
“Belief has the power to change your inner state and your outer world.”
As we clear blocks to our spiritual intelligence, we feel better about our possibilities. We also feel confident in our ability to create the lives we desire. Mental intelligence includes our ability to find solutions to the challenges we face. When we do this, our growing belief in our possibilities is then reflected in the quality of our emotions, which become lighter and more supportive of creating a positive future.
Emotional Intelligence
This brings us to emotional level. Our feelings are inwardly-oriented, returning to what is occurring in our inner world.
Expansive emotions like happiness, gratitude, and enthusiasm lift our spirits. When we feel good about ourselves and our possibilities, our emotions support us in feeling alive and good about where we are going.
When we are bogged down in restrictive emotions like fear, stress, anxiety, worry, anger, etc., we may also notice how that possibilities seem to be limited. We feel disconnected from our spiritual source and we can’t think clearly enough to find productive solutions to the challenges we face.
Restrictive emotions also reduce our life energy. In such states, our sense of physical well-being may also become constricted, potentially leading to pain and disease.
This is where the importance of emotional intelligence comes in. Rather than defining emotions as positive or negative, understanding them as expansive, supportive, and energizing or restrictive, limiting, and de-energizing allows us to view them in a more resourceful way.
It’s also worth noting that some emotions are neutral, not expansive or restrictive. We all need breaks, and neutral emotions allow us to be at rest. In the long term, however, more expansive emotions lift us more firmly onto the path to the life we desire.
The Range of Emotions:
• Expansive, Supportive, and Energizing Emotions: Love, happiness, gratitude, excitement, optimism
• Neutral Emotions: Satisfaction, stillness
• Restrictive, Limiting, and De-energizing Emotions: Fear, anxiety, anger, frustration, jealousy, hatred, depression
There are, of course, more emotions, and you can guess where they fit in this scenario. You may also notice the difference in the way you feel physically as you read each list.
The Key to Emotional Intelligence
As holistic coaches and trainers, we came to understand that restrictive emotions provide identifiable indicators that we are off track in relation to where we long to go in life. Such emotions offer messages that can increase our awareness and understanding of what is needed to get back on course.
A good example is confusion. Confusion feels uncomfortable and we’d all agree that it feels limiting. Not much feels possible in this state. Nonetheless, there is a positive message in it. Confusion is an indication that we are trying to expand our possibilities, which is positive. And when we want to do this, entering unexplored territory, it’s understandable that we don’t know how to proceed. Spiritually, we may also notice self-doubt entering the picture, worrying that we aren’t good enough, etc. Sound familiar?
With emotions, we use processes like EFT and SK to transcend them. As we return to a state of wholeness with these techniques, we feel better about ourselves and our potential for moving forward with greater ease.
An Example of Tapping into Emotional Intelligence
Jane recently worked with a client we will call Linda who was building a holistic practice. Linda was confused about how to get her message out and felt completely stuck. They discussed the message behind the confusion and Jane guided Linda through a process to clear it. After a single round, she felt much better.
Linda then realized that the real problem was that she doubted herself. The self-doubt cleared with the confusion and Linda now felt confident about her direction. In just a few short minutes, Linda went from a completely unresourceful state to one where she was ready and even excited about taking the next step in the direction of her dream.
On a related note, while experiencing the confusion, Linda also noticed that she felt the confusion in the area around her heart, an awareness that connects to the intelligence of the body. It, too, provides messages for us.
Physical Intelligence
In the body, as suggested, restrictive emotions create physical discomfort, pain, and even disease. The body’s wisdom, our physical intelligence, communicates through sensations of being energized and well or sensations of discomfort, tightness, pain or even disease when our aliveness has become restricted.
As an example, you could view the spine as the body’s foundation. When we feel unsupported, it’s common to have back pain, especially in the lower back. And we all know what a pain in the neck means. The messages in the body can help us to develop emotional, mental, and spiritual intelligence.
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Keys for Developing Your Emotional and Spiritual Intelligence
You’ve seen now how our sense of who we are and where we are going plays out in the different levels of our being. The question is how to proceed in developing our four levels of intelligence.
Some Important Elements for Developing Emotional and Spiritual Intelligence
• Opening to Self-Exploration: Accessing our wholeness by developing our emotional and spiritual intelligence requires honest self-exploration. This can be a new experience for some. Fortunately, we all have the capacity to view ourselves more objectively. Spiritually, the key is to realize that there is hidden treasure within you that is waiting to be discovered. If this is true (and it is), why would any of us want to stay where we are?
• Using Restricting Emotions as Doorways: As we learn the deeper meanings behind our emotions, we can use them as doorways to greater awareness, which are surprisingly enriching. With the gift of this new awareness, we can clear the blocks that hold us back much more easily and effectively.
• Clearing Blocks: We live in an amazing age when we can clear emotional and spiritual blocks with greater ease than any time in history. Powerful processes like the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) and Spiritual Kinesiology (SK) can often transform limiting emotions in a matter of minutes. This leads us to the best part.
• Accessing the Truth Within: Clearing emotional blocks with EFT or SK takes us to a state of spiritual presence where we can access a deeper understanding of ourselves and how to take the next steps on the path to our full potential.
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