Emotional Intelligence - a bit more …

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When I think of EI, I often think of other terms used in the principles to describe those states of mind conducive to mastery of karate, martial arts and self-defense. One is a mind-no-mind state. A kind of  mindlessness that is often mistaken as a black mind but that is actually a strained effort to blank out the conscious mind in the mistake in thinking that leads to proficient application of karate and martial arts. 

Mind-no-mind or mindlessness or elements of EI are as follows:

1. Bodily Regulation
2. Attuned Communication
3. Emotional Balance
4. Response Flexibility
5. Fear Modulation (I would add in anger modulation as well for self-defense)
6. Empathy
7. Insight
8. Moral Awareness
9. Intuition

• BR: All of these when properly understood provide us the knowledge, understanding and ability to apply ourselves to the brains two functions of sympathetic and parasympathetic balance. This is how we regulate our bodies dependent on circumstance, situations and emotional intelligence. 
• AC: Our attuned communications are about attune ourselves with others to allow our own internal state to shift and resonate with the inner worlds of others. 
• EB: To achieve emotional balance means we are at ease and we feel alive, we have meaning and vitality and we achieve “Equanimity, i.e., the ability to stay clear and focused in the face of stressors from both inside ourselves and outside of us, the outer world.” 
• RF: This is learning to harness our power over our middle prefrontal region so that we can put a temporal space, a void, between the input of the external world, the comparative data of our inner world and the actions we may or might take. It is that proverbial count to ten thing but more cerebral in nature. This allows us to achieve full awareness of the situation and what is happening so we may apply restraint and suppress our impulses that often originate from our monkey brains so we may consider various options for response or rather allow our procedural memory to enact the appropriate zombie sub-routine. 
• FM: When humans experience a frightening and/or dangerous event we may feel that same fear when confronted in another same or similar encounter. It is shown in current research that, “The middle prefrontal region of the brain has direct connections that pass sown into the limbic system and make it possible to inhibit and modulate the firing of our fear-creating amygdala. We consciously harness this connection to override our cortex to calm our lower limbic agitation.”
• E: I have a complete article on empathy but in short it is the capacity to create images of other peoples minds, the enabling to sense their internal mental state of mind. We can sense, actually perceive through body, etc., signals seen by our senses, the other’s intentions and imagine what an event means in his or her mind. 
• I: Insight is achieving the ability to perceive our own mind. We connect our past with our present and then anticipate our future. 
• MA: These are the ways in which humans both think about and enact behaviors for the social good, i.e., the family and the tribe, etc. “The middle prefrontal cortex enables humans to move beyond their immediate, individually focused survival needs, and even beyond the present version of any situation, to a vision of a larger, interconnected whole.”
• I: This comes from our middle prefrontal cortex and gives humans access to the wisdom of our bodies. This region is where the term, gut feelings, came about because the middle prefrontal cortex receives signals from the interior of our bodies, including the viscera - our heart, our intestines, etc., and uses those signals to give us that gut feeling or to tingle that spidey sense. You see, it isn’t the mystical psychic thing but a unconscious, subconscious and instinctual set of signals our procedural memory hears to select appropriate sub-routines, if they exist. 

These are the EI skills necessary to find balance in all things. These same things although meant for life and living take on more importance when we encounter conflicts and violence where we need self-defense for survival. 

Bibliography (Click the link)