When we were children, our emotions may have served us by acting as a barometer to let us know when there was a difference between what the adults around us were saying and what was really going on. Oftentimes, that “gut feeling” was much more accurate than what adults were telling us was going on.

But now that you’re an adult, have your emotions passed their sell-by date? Are they actually giving you the awareness of what’s going on around you that’s what you were really seeking, or are they adding trauma and drama and lots of stuff to work through to your busy schedule?

Gary Douglas, best-selling author and founder of Access Consciousness™ has a quite different point of view on those valuable feelings.

Douglas is not the only one seeing a limitation in emotions. David Brooks, a columnist writing in the International Herald Tribune November 30, 2011, asked people over 70 to send him “life reports,” essays about their lives and what they’d done poorly and well.

Based on the life stories he received, Brooks observed, “Beware rumination. There were many long, detailed essays by people who are experts at self-examination. They could finely calibrate each passing emotion. But these people often did not lead the happiest or most fulfilling lives…Through self-obsession, they seemed to reinforce the very emotions, thoughts, and habits they were trying to escape.”

Plenty of medical research documents the effect of our emotions on our physical health. People who are usually happy, enthusiastic, and content are less likely to develop heart disease, according to Europe’s leading cardiology journal, European Heart Journal, in a study published February 2010.

Marcelle Pick, nurse practitioner writing on the website women to women.com, calls emotional experience a greater factor in physical health than genetics, exposure to infection, or lifestyle.

In Douglas’s view, “The only thing an infinite being should feel is joy, bliss and ecstasy.” Since most of us either don’t acknowledge we are infinite beings, or don’t act like we are most of the time, it’s no surprise that joy, bliss and ecstasy are not yet running rampant on the planet.

As Douglas sees it, thoughts, feelings, and emotions are the lower harmonic of what an infinite being does, which is to perceive, know, and be. Emotion is the lower harmonic of being; thought is the lower harmonic of knowing; and feeling is the lower harmonic of knowing.

If we stood up and saluted ourselves as infinite beings, would all those emotions that are adding so many struggles to our lives go away instantly? Not necessarily. It’s a process. But Douglas has some phenomenal tools to clear away a lot of what’s getting bogged down with your own and others’ emotions and distracting you from creating what you’d really like to have in life.

Many emotions that run soap opera plots and our daily lives are what Douglas calls distractor implants. They are points of view and judgments that we bought from others. We have been acting as if they’re true ever since. The purpose of distractor implants is to keep us from seeing the great and unlimited quality of us.

The distractor implant emotions are anger, rage, fury, hate; blame, shame, regret, and guilt; obsessive, perverted, compulsive and addictive points of view; love, sex, relationships, jealousy. These emotions cannot be handled, assuaged, relieved, changed, or ameliorated. Their only purpose is to distract you from the greatness that you can be.

So if you find yourself in the middle of these emotions, how can you change the situation? First of all, recognize that you are witnessing distractor implants in action. None of what’s being expressed with such emotion is real or resolvable. Once you recognize these distractor implants, all you have to do is ask for all the secret stuff underneath them that’s keeping them all in place, and destroy and uncreate it all. (Uncreate has a slightly different energy than destroy; it makes the erasing of them more complete.)

Sound too weird to be true? Well, let me ask you this: How well does anger management actually work? Have you ever seen guilt or regret resolved? Is the jealous person ever satisfied, or does another excuse for their jealousy arise almost instantly?

There is one time that it’s appropriate for an infinite being to feel angry. That situation is when someone is lying to you. If you’re having a conversation with someone—or reading an email—and you find yourself suddenly feeling enraged for no apparent reason when you were previously in a fine mood, you could ask, “Where is the lie here, spoken or unspoken?” If the anger dissipates as soon as you ask that question, that’s an indication there’s a lie you’re being told. The lie tends to be more often unspoken than spoken. Your anger was serving as your personal crap detector.

Another aspect contributing to creating the sea of emotions that most people spend much of their lives embroiled in is the recognition that we are much more aware, psychic even, than we have ever acknowledged. As Douglas describes it, we are all walking around like giant Sponge Bobs and Sponge Bobettes, absorbing all the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of others. Our awareness of them is a good thing; the danger comes in when we misidentify that everything we feel is ours. “Just because we can feel it doesn’t mean it’s ours,” Douglas points out.

Are you doubting that you are that psychic? And by psychic I don’t mean owning a crystal ball and wearing purple robes. Have you ever walked into a room where (unseen and unheard by you) there had been an argument a short time before? Didn’t you feel that energy? What did you say? “I have a lump in my throat,” “I feel nauseous,” “My heart hurts.” Whenever you say something like that, you are giving your body instruction. It says, “Okay, I’ll feel nauseous since you ask,” “Okay, I’ll make your heart hurt,” “Oh, you want a lump in your throat?”

One of Douglas’s clients walked into a meeting room where he was conducting a class. The room had hosted a wedding reception the evening before. No one ever drinks too much in a wedding reception, right? Douglas’s client said, “I feel nauseous.” She ended up lying on the floor and eventually going outside to control “her” nausea.

She could have said, “What am I perceiving here?” or “What’s the awareness I’m having that I’m not acknowledging?” This could have led to more awareness of what was really going on and prevented her from sticking her own body with the nausea of the drunken wedding revelers.

Part of the difficulty is in language. One word Douglas recommends we use instead is perceive. “Perceive” is a word that’s seldom used. We use the word “feelings” to describe the Barry Manilow-type emotions, as well as the more neutral perceptions we’re having of the world around us. This overuse of the word feelings creates lack of clarity and unnecessary suffering in our bodies. As soon as we say we feel something, we make it ours and stick our body with it, like the woman with the nausea. The word “sense” is another good substitute for the over-used word feeling.

Another potent tool that Douglas has created to assist his clients world-wide in identifying which feelings are actually theirs in the first place is a question: Who does that belong to? If you ask the question and perceive a feeling of lightness in your body, your mood, or the world around you, that’s a great indication that what you’re perceiving is an awareness of what someone around you is feeling, not you. This is true even if the lightness persists only for a nanosecond and the heavier feeling returns.

If you feel lighter when you ask the question, the thought, feeling, or emotion in question is not yours. Quote Elvis: ask it to “return to sender.” If it comes back, if you feel yourself swimming in that ugly soup again, destroy and uncreate all your decisions to buy that psychic debris as yours when it wasn’t.

Would you like to upgrade your feelings to joy, bliss, and ecstasy? The tools discussed above can greatly facilitate you in doing so:

• When you find yourself feeling something, ask “Who does this belong to?” If it’s light, it’s not yours!
• Another great question is, “What am I perceiving here that I’m not acknowledging?”
• When you find yourself feeling angry, ask “Where is the lie here, spoken or unspoken?”
• Whenever the distractor implants come up (anger, rage, fury, hate, blame, shame, regret, guilt, obsessive, compulsive, addictive, perverted points of view, doubt, fear, jealousy) ask the universe to destroy and uncreate everything underneath that.