The most important aspect of life is how we create connection. This is a process that occurs much like a circuit, with the battery of the circuit being our emotions and the processor being our mind. 

The connection circuit is about human connection. It identifies the components necessary for connection, accurate thought, appropriate expression and authentic experiences, as well as the resistors which disrupt, displace and distort our circuit of connection.

Elemid is refining, defining and aligning in order to create connection to ourselves and the world around us. 

By refining the components of connection into emotional elements, we can 

define our expression with the intention to align these elements with our values. When we do this we are able to restore rather than deplete our circuit of connection.

By identifying ones emotional expression, we become more aware of the connection we are creating and intentional about the emotion we are expressing. This allows us to connect more accurately, appropriately, and authentically to what we value.

• The individual nature of feelings make them an inefficient path to connection. Feelings come from individual thoughts infused with individual experiences. The infinite combination of thoughts and experience makes it difficult to have the same feelings at the same time as another person. Feelings help us navigate ourselves. 
• We all have emotions in common. They are biological and we have all experienced the same emotions, even when we have not been able to identify them. Emotions help us navigate each other. 
• Identifying both feelings and emotions are important but for different reasons. Identifying feelings can be used to identify the underlying emotion.  It is identifying the underlying emotional expression which allows us to connect.

Emotions  are evolutionary and biologic, often experienced without thought. There are 8 emotions. You know it is an emotion when they move you. Emotions are reactions that seem to "hit us" or come out of nowhere, moving us to a physical expression, often tears. Emotions are moments, like a moment of surprise, anger, or sadness. Our emotions tend to be expressed and subside, in a cycle. When we have a sustained emotional state, we can experience  distress. Emotions move us outward, which is why we have to express emotion and when we do not, disconnection becomes the diagnosis. 

Each of the 8 emotions have a specific expression and can be categorized into types of emotion. There are connecting and disconnection emotions. There are also motivating and demotivating emotions. The 4 elements of emotions are used to organize emotions into a cycle, based on principles of science, like charge and balance.

Feelings connect our thoughts and emotions. Feelings are from our awareness, even when we can not identify them. Feelings are an interpretation of information from our thoughts or body. Feelings allow us to know where we are within ourselves. Feelings are like symptoms and they take us inward. Feelings can linger and become where we get "stuck", an inefficiency in connection. 

• Feelings that we have from our body we interpreted in our mind. We have feelings of the body that come into our central nervous system, called sensations (afferent).  Our emotions cause afferent feelings, that our mind interprets into experience.
• Feelings that we have from emotion are felt in our body. We have feelings of the mind that come out of our central nervous system and into our body, these are visceral feelings (efferent). Our thoughts give us efferent feelings that our body interprets into experience. 

I would refer to this more as unconscious thoughts that lead to feelings that we become aware of. We also can have unconscious emotions that we mistake for feelings. Remember, feelings connect our thoughts and emotions.  

• When we are able to respond we have more control.
• We almost instinctively focus on feelings from our body. When the feelings from our body are driving our thoughts we are reactive. 
• When our thoughts lead to feelings that become the emotions we express we are responsive. 
• When we feel our thoughts and express our emotions we are able to respond more than react.

Most of us have heard of a hierarchy of needs. I focus on a hierarchy of having:

• What we have. (In the present)
• What we want to have. (In the future)
• What we need to have. (To move beyond the past)
• What we have had. (Past)

The 8 emotions can be further categorized into states of having.