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The Importance of “Feeling our Feelings …”

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I do understand the importance of “feeling our feelings” in the process of emotional healing. I DO value the part of the process that recognizes and releases emotion; feelings are energetic impulses that act like messengers whose job is to report to us the state of our current vibrational frequency, and to show us the unhappy thoughts we are  believing!

I worked in addictions/co-dependency treatment for years where we facilitated anger/shame/grief work with our clients, and I was well-schooled in the popular idea that only by releasing childhood suppressed emotional material can we move past our emotional stuck-ness.

That said, however, I have come to question the widely-held assumption that drumming up an emotional response helps us unload accrued emotional pain. I have not found that doing this sort of emotional venting actually eliminates, or dissipates the emotional energy being regurgitated. Instead I’ve seen that the more we drum up feeling, the more feeling we generate for release. This was confusing to me. If the feelings are old, stored up emotion in need of release, then why, in the releasing process, do we seem to generate even MORE of it?

Such inner seeking and questioning allowed me to develop a radically different way of understanding what the role of feelings is in the healing process; that shift in the way I see feelings served to transform the way I work with others. What I realized was that feelings come from thoughts, or from old imprinted belief patterns – only every time.

What we feel is determined by what we think and believe!  This understanding prompted a huge turn around in me because I realized that, until and unless we begin to intervene at the level of what we believe, the grieving(shame/anger) NEVER ends. Initiating feeling work without addressing the beliefs behind those feelings will not bring true clearing. It cannot, because we will just go on generating the negative emotional states we are trying to eliminate! We must question the beliefs and thoughts that produced the feelings in the first place if we want real relief!

It is in the amygdala, that tiny gland located in the temporal lobe of the brain, where thought impulses convert to emotion, which are then transmitted to the rest of the body, producing the physiological responses associated with the feelings generated there.

Please do not misunderstand. I do not mean to undermine the emotional body. It is very important. Our feelings DO play a critical role, and therefore need to be experienced. But what happens when we understand the true relationship between thoughts and feelings is that we work differently with those feelings.

Once we understand that our thoughts, not our life circumstances, cause our pain, we stop feeling at the mercy of life, of other peoples behavior, and of our own feelings! We come to see that the only thing that can possibly victimize us is our own thinking.

Understanding that our beliefs are what causes our feelings allows us to use our feelings as the messengers they are meant to be. Feelings alert us that we are thinking painful thoughts. By questioning those thoughts our feelings can TRULY shift (we’re not talking about denial or stuffing feelings here, but genuine emotional shifts). Misery dissipates as we reframe our perception of a situation. This is what I have seen happen, over and again.

Of course, this is for you to discover for yourself. I recommend that you experiment with the concept that feelings come from our unhappy thoughts, rather than the old idea that feelings come from what happens “to us.” Try questioning your  troubling thoughts about your life happenings, rather than blaming them as being the cause of your unhappy feelings.

To learn more about how to do that, read, Guiding Principles for Life Beyond Victim Consciousness, as well as, “Loving What Is,”  by Byron Katie (www.thework.com).

Blessings, Lynne

Even Our Nightmares Teach ….

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Creative Commons License photo credit: Hadi Zaher

I spent the day yesterday struggling with an inner state of low-frequency mind-spin. The thing that triggered me seemed to be emotional fall-out from a nightmare I’d awakened from that morning.

In my nightmare I was in a once-upon-a-time-all-too-familiar state of rage of the kind I used to experience often some years back when the victim-mind ruled. I was railing and ranting in my nightmare at my husband (who wasn’t my present mate, Daniel) about something he said or did. I was striking out at everyone around me and blaming my mind-spinning behavior on anything and everything BUT me. I was all about being right, and I was totally focused on seeking vindication for how wrongly I felt I’d been treated. My nightmare was, in essence, a flashback to how I’d once lived

SHaPes -my life!

I awoke from my nightmare feeling totally hung-over, as if I’d been on a drunk, and, in truth I had been! I’d spent the night underground, hanging out in the dark, dank, and dangerous hellholes of my own inner making. And my nightmare showed me, in vibrant technicolor, the misery I am still capable of producing for myself if, and whenever, I choose to believe my own insane thoughts about life around me.

The low-frequency emotional state I awakened from my nightmare in stayed with me for the rest of the day. In the past, I would have tried to escape the feelings, to shake them off, deny them, or I might have spiraled into worse feelings generated by the “reasons” behind such a nightmare, and what it was saying about me and my problems.

Instead, this time, I struggled to bring consciousness to my thoughts about it. Rather than feeling at the mercy of my “mood” and dumping it on to those around me, as I might have once done, I contained my emotional reactivity instead, and studied the thoughts. Even though I continued to carry some heaviness through the day, I was also aware of some relief, resulting, I think, from having consciously refrained from totally identifying with my unhappy thoughts.

It really wasn’t until the next morning during my daily practice that I was able to fully resurface from my dark inner cavern. Like the sun breaking through dense clouds, the light of Reality finally broke through the heavy layer of story-laden fog that engulfed me, and ‘en-lightened’ (shone light from within) me, and in doing so, inner peace was restored.

 

I’ve come to the conclusion that these “nightmare” moments, whether they occur in sleeping or waking life, are great teaching moments – may, in fact, be a necessary part of expanding our consciousness. I have more to say on this topic next time.

 

Blessings, Lynne

 

Defending Our Right To Feel Bad …

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tired and without
Creative Commons License photo credit: gogoloopie

I recently had a conversation with a loved one who was bemoaning her present life circumstances. She spoke about how hard life was for her family right now, and about how life had put SOOOOO much on her plate, that it felt unbearable at times, like it was all just too much.

She then proceeded to list all the “hard stuff” that life was “forcing her” to deal with. Her list was indeed daunting; there were pressing health and financial issues, as well as difficult family dynamics mentioned, and the more she talked about it, the sadder she became. Soon she was crying softly.

I listened quietly … hearing plainly the pain that comes from believing our own self-punishing thoughts, and aware too, of the abundance of victim language in her speech. My heart went out to her, and yet I was hesitant in my response, wondering how best to support her towards a higher frequency, and simultaneously thinking how tricky it can be at times to connect with someone we are close to from a place that does not come across as superior, or above it all.

It can sometimes feel like walking through a loaded minefield (mind-field) when we are conversing with a loved one who is unconscious in that moment of just how mired in victim consciousness they are. (Remember we ALL move in and out of victim consciousness throughout any given day – so I don’t mean to imply that it never happens to me!) Perhaps the biggest danger in finding our way through this mental minefield is that we run the risk of becoming part of the explosive minefield ourselves!

When we have a personal history with someone especially, it can be tricky indeed to stay grounded in Reality, especially when, in that moment, they are not! The mind automatically wants to take us “back there” (to the childhood drama we played out as children) and so we automatically act as if we are still back there, thus relentlessly playing-out our old, tired, and limiting stories on each other, over and again.

This makes for unhappy trekking indeed!

Even though this particular family member happens to be someone who I consider to be fairly well-versed in, and sincere about practicing, the principles of consciousness, it’s still pretty tricky, perhaps even because of her knowledge of consciousness work.

The danger is that in sharing feedback with her she might feel insulted by any insinuation that she is in victim consciousness, triggering an immediate defensive reaction in her and justifying a need for denial!

Such defensive reaction occurs frequently when one is in victim consciousness, and my family member’s words had already conveyed how deeply unhappy she was with her life (herself) so to hear someone insinuate that she might be in victim feels to be a huge insult! Why? Because it induces a huge shame attack — after all, she “should know better, she “should be further along than that.” Now the humiliation is even more pronounced. To think that she should be ‘outed’ as being caught up in victim consciousness is the ultimate indicator of failure to a self in distress.

And sure enough, just about the time I was thinking these sorts of thoughts, my loved one did indeed appear to get triggered by something I said (I do not remember what I said exactly, but I bet SHE does! ;))

Whatever it was she heard, it was apparently enough to justify her need, and indeed obligation, to defend her own level of consciousness, because she proceeded to launch into an all-out defense of her right to feel bad. (Oh my, do I ever know that one! ;))

She said things like, “I know people (was she insinuating me, perhaps?) think I am having such a hard life because I made wrong choices, that I didn’t do it right, and that that’s why I have all these problems, but … etc … etc. ” She proceeded to defend the choices she had made that had landed her where she is in life now, and then went on to say, “I know these things happen for a reason … I see the reasons, I’ve done my work and I understand these things are meant to be, and I know I will be fine. I will fight my way through this …” – and then she began to defend her right to feel bad in earnest – “… but still, these things hurt me and I have the right to feel my feelings about them. I love myself enough to allow myself to feel the pain about the hard things that life has put on my plate.”

But here is what seemed only too plain to me: It was plain to me that her pain was NOT caused by “the hard things life had put on her plate,” (who is this “life” that puts hard things on our plate, anyway?!) but was instead caused by the relentless negative judgment she was aiming at herself for having these hard things on her plate at all! SHE appeared to be the one, in my opinion, who was believing that she blew it! It was her OWN judgment of herself, her self-condemnation, that had her believing life is hard because she had “failed at life.”

This idea of letting ourselves feel our feelings as being a way to be kind to ourselves makes no sense to me these days. (yes, I admit there was a time when I thought similarly.) When the feelings I am feeling are created by my own self-punishing thoughts, by my own low opinions of myself, by my choices, and by my own self-condemnation for where I am in life, how can it be loving to me to “just let myself sit in such feelings?”

It seems much kinder to me to question any thought that generates such painful feelings and re-frame those unkind beliefs into a kinder perception of myself, my life, and my choices, so that I can feel more loving and accepting of myself!

But I do indeed recognize this place on the path! This place of thinking that the words, “nothing happens by coincidence,” means that when life is hard it’s because of my own failures.

Try this exercise: Look back on your own life to a particular “choice-point,” a time when you made a decision that had direct impact on where you are now, and ask yourself this question:
Could I have made any other choice than the one I made at that time? Seriously, considering the circumstances of that time, and my own state of consciousness at the time, could I have done it any other way, really?

If the answer is no, (and how can it be otherwise, for why else would you have made that choice?) then how could where you are now be any different than what it is now?

Can you see that where you are right now, no matter your opinion of where that is, (it’s all story anyway :)), is where you must be right now to make your own limiting beliefs visible?

But if instead you go on berating yourself for where you are in life, then how are you ever going to make different choices?

We must forgive ourselves for being imperfect, for being where we are, and immediately when we do, we begin to see more clearly so that we can make higher frequency choices that set us on a more self-fulfilling life path.

The simple truth is this: our life circumstances, including all of our relationships, are the way they are to show us our PRESENT belief system. Any degree of resistance we feel towards our life circumstances reflect to us where we are out of harmony with ourselves. Our painful feelings are about that disharmony with ourself and are NEVER the result of our external difficulties.

May we become increasingly loving and self-forgiving, and in that way melt away all sense of a difficult life.

Blessings,

Lynne

 

 

 

 

Using the Aikido of Consciousness to Side-Step Blame

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Wake up!
Creative Commons License photo credit: Eddi van W.

The observer self is that neutral inner space that allows us to recognize that people tend to automatically react from their own unconscious patterns of belief, rather than because of us. This knowledge makes it possible for us to stop making their reactivity about us.

This means we can stop taking the doings and sayings (and all the reactions) of others, so personal! We do not have to make their choices, and reactions towards us, about us.

None the less many of us do personalize the behavior of others. We assume people do what they do “at” or “to” us, and that’s where the trouble begins.

Rather than observing that people are miserable because they believe their own unhappy thoughts about themselves, and the world, we, like them, tend to blame external factors, outside situations, and other people, for the misery we feel, and that we witness in them. This search for an external cause makes it easy to fall prey to a “witch hunt” (victim) mentality in an effort to find who or what is to blame for the misery we see and experience.

The simple truth is that as long as we think there is an external cause for our own (and their) misery, we will have no choice BUT to go on seeking something/someone else to blame for the unhappiness we see.

The blame game is one of finding external causes for pain, rather than to understand that all misery originates in the mind of the one who is miserable. Always. No exceptions. Yes, sad, traumatic, painful things happen in life, to all of us. But even our emotional responses to things such as these are created by what we tell ourselves about them, and not the events in and of themselves.

This need to find something outside ourselves to blame is a primary characteristic of victim consciousness. Taking personal responsibility is equated with self-blame when we are operating in victim consciousness, and that HURTS too much! So for most of us in victim consciousness, it is far more preferable to blame someone else for our pain than to experience the debilitating pain and self-degradation that blaming ourself causes! And who can blame us?

Blaming is what those of us caught up in victim consciousness do. This is because no one ever taught us that it is our thinking and not outside events that cause our pain. Therefore when we are unhappy, we look for something “out there” to blame for it. Blaming others becomes a way to protect ourselves from being blamed: blaming outside people and events becomes our default setting for self-preservation.

But there is another alternative besides the “blame game.”

Our perception and response to life changes dramatically when we learn to look for the underlying belief pattern that is the true culprit that causes our unhappiness.

Rather than to engage in a victim strategy that requires us to defend our innocence by, in turn, blaming others, we can instead learn to sidestep the accusations others hurl our way in their attempts to protect themselves, and, like an Aikido master who skillfully steps aside, we learn to allow the negative energy force of blame to go by us observed, but unheeded. This side-stepping motion allows us to step aside into an observer space, to remain calm and detached (rather than to personalize the attack), and so allows something totally new and more positive to transpire instead.

I recommend my book, Guiding Principles for Life Beyond Victim Consciousness, as a step by step guide in learning more about how to access observer consciousness, and sidestep blame.

Blessings, Lynne

Am I responsible for my feelings and thoughts, or are they?

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crossroads
 photo credit: Lori Greig

There are two distinct ways of perceiving our thoughts and feelings. We either believe that the world outside of us, particularly other people, determines our feelings OR we believe that it is our thoughts that determines our feelings. The perception we choose makes a huge difference in the quality of life we get to experience!

When we believe others make us feel, we perceive life as victims. We see others as having say-so over our emotional well-being, therefore we are at their mercy. As a result we constantly attempt to control, or change, the way they interact with us so that we don’t get hurt by them.

When we understand that it’s our thoughts that determines our feelings, then we are not at the mercy of external events or other people. We mind less what others think or do, because we know that we have a choice about how to perceive what happens. This perception leaves us free and in charge of our own emotional state.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say several of us are scheduled to meet for lunch today. When we all get to the agreed upon restaurant, the maitre’d informs us that food is no longer being served. Even though he says the same thing to all of us, everyone of us has a different reaction to the news. As we look around we notice an array of different emotions on the faces of our friends.

Ted is angry, thinking, “why didn’t anyone check on serving hours before we made the trip?! Beth, on the other hand feels disappointed, “this is the only place that serves something that works on my diet, she pouts. Jerry is anxious, “My blood levels are dangerously low – now I have to wait even longer before I can eat! What if I pass out?!” And Sally feels excited! “Oh, this is great! she thinks, “finally a chance to try that new restaurant down the street that I’ve been wanting to try!”

So each person is having a totally different feeling experience in response to the external situation. If it were the situation causing our feelings, the feelings would be the same around the circle – but that’s not the case. Instead the emotional response is different for each person, because their reaction has nothing to do with what was said, but is about what they are telling themselves about what was said. Therefore it is their thoughts that produces their emotional response, not the external situation. External situations are triggers, nothing more; they are not the cause of our emotional state!

If someone punches us in the face, and we spiral into a negative, fear-based train of thought (which, granted, is what most of us would tend to do automatically simply because it’s what we expect to feel in such a situation), then we will feel all the feelings that go with that set of thoughts and beliefs.

If, on the other hand, we are punched in the face, and our thought is “Glad that’s over! Let’s move on,” and there’s nothing in us that needs to hang on to that negative event, or make the other person into an enemy, or to make them see what they “did to us!” then we may find, much to our amazement and delight, that we are able to move quickly into a totally different feeling experience, one that returns us more quickly to peace.

Being at peace does not mean condoning “bad behavior” by the way (see my last post). We might take immediate and decisive action to intervene on a situation in some way, but we have learned that we don’t have to hold onto a negative spin about what happened in order to move towards change.

We learn to take action to protect ourselves, but how we feel about what happens in our lives, i.e. the story we tell ourselves about how, what, and why things happen, is up to us. We can choose to see our life situations in terms of unfairness, and feel persecuted and mistreated, or we can see the things that happen in our lives as stepping stones to a better place. Since what we tell ourselves determines how we feel, why wouldn’t we choose to perceive our life situations in a kinder, more loving way?

The truth is that when we assume responsibility for the feelings of others we easily move into the need and compulsion to manage their responses and outcomes (for example. “I shouldn’t tell them the truth because they will feel bad” or “they shouldn’t say those things so I’m going to set them straight…” etc.). We move into ‘shouldville’ and try to control things into being the way we think they should be. Resistance inevitably results.

The healthier alternative is to assume 100% responsibility for the thoughts that are (ALWAYS) responsible for our feelings and to simultaneously treat others with the respect and kindness that comes from aligning with basic guiding principles. Such guiding principles allow us to see that others (always) respond the way they do because they believe what they think. We further come to see that what others say to us, regardless of whether we think they should speak to us thusly or not, is not coincidental at all, but, because the world is a mirror, their responses will be for us a reflection of our own beliefs.

Being responsible for our thoughts and feelings vs taking responsibility for the thoughts and feelings of others means we assume responsibility for our own tone of voice, for our choice of words in conveying our message, for maintaining respect for ourselves and them, if for no other reason than because we want to be treated with the same degree of respect and kindness.

In short, we can assume 100% responsibility for our own feelings and know that others are responsible for their feelings without being cold and unkind towards them.

My book, Guiding Principles for Life Beyond Victim Consciousness, goes into great detail about learning the difference between these two ways of perceiving the world. You will not only learn how to recognize when you are in a victim mentality, but also how to extricate yourself from it. I highly recommend it if you want to enhance your understanding of these principles.

Blessings,

Lynne

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