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One of the functions of emotion is to focus our conscious awareness on the problem at hand, the one that has

triggered our emotions. Typically, our emotions do not operate outside of our awareness, although that can happen. We have all had the experience of not realizing we have been acting emotionally until someone points it out. Although that does happen, more commonly we are consciously aware of how we are feeling. The emotions we are experiencing feel right, justified. We don't question what we are doing and saying. We are in the swing of it. If we are to put a brake on our emotional behavior, if we are to change how we are feeling, we must be able to develop a different type of emotional consciousness. We must be able to take a step backright while we are feeling the emotionso we can question whether we want to go along with what our emotion is driving us to do, or exercise a choice about how we will act on our emotion. This is more than being conscious of how we are feeling, it is another, more advanced, difficult to describe, form of consciousness. It is close to what Buddhist thinkers call mindfulness. Philosopher B. Alan Wallace says this is "the sense of being aware of what our mind is doing."19 If we are mindful of our emotions, he says, we can make the following choice: "Do we want to act upon the anger, or do we simply want to observe it."20 I am not using the term mindful because it is embedded in a larger, quite different philosophy from what I have described for understanding emotion, and it depends on quite specific practices, different from the steps I have and will suggest. In writing about memory, psychologists Georgia Nigro and Ulric Neisser described how "in some memories one seems to have the position of an onlooker or observer, looking at the situation from an external vantage point and seeing oneself 'from the outside.'" 21 They contrasted this type of memory to one in which you have the perspective of the person in the memory. In much of our emotional experience we are so much in the experience, so gripped by the emotion, that no part of our mind is observing, questioning, or considering the actions in which we are engaging. We are conscious, aware, but in what psychologist Ellen Langer calls a mindless way.22 Nigro and Neisser's distinction between two types of memory is

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