Tag: courage

On Emotion

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

My emotions always seem to be an issue in my life. I suppress things like anger and then explode. I get way too excited about things then get let down when they don’t happen like I want. Somebody says one small thing and I can become so defensive and cry.
How can I become more balanced with my emotions? How do I turn down the craziness?

Sincerely,

Emotion Commotion

Dear EC,

There are other forms of intelligence in this existence than just intellectual intelligence. The very nature of the mind is that it is discriminatory – it will always be dividing things into this or that, putting everything into it’s box or category.

This may serve you for survival, but it does not serve you when it comes to creating a beautiful life.

If you go about in life with the mind as your primary way of experiencing, you will question anything that does not seem rational or logical, even if the experience was beautiful for you.

So why am I talking so much about the mind when you are asking about emotions?

You see, your intellect will only take you so far. The way human beings are today, the vast majority are incapable of using their mind to get them to experience life in all it’s beauty.

Think about it, when you had a truly beautiful experience in this life, was it your mind or your emotions that were fully on, intensity at maximum? Of course it was your emotion.

Not everyone is capable of using their mind this intensely without going around in circles. But everyone is capable of using their emotions intensely. Everyone knows this experience.

This isn’t really about balancing your emotion. I want you to see that deep down, you know that the times in your life when you were 100% involved with your emotion, intensely involved, absolutely involved – that is when you felt most alive.

It doesn’t matter if it was anger, jealousy, joy, sadness – only through emotions have you felt the potential of how intense life can be.

Now sometimes, it is an unpleasant emotion. Because of this unpleasantness, you want to switch it off. But emotion is just emotion. There is no good or bad emotion. Shall we switch off your capacity for joy as well?

What you may be lacking is an emotional maturity. The emotions are just happening based on external situations. Something outside comes and pinches you, so you cry. Then something outside comes and kisses you, so you smile. Like this, you go on endlessly in life, a slave to what life brings you. Crossing your fingers and hoping for the best is not a good strategy.

You cannot control the external ever. It happens as it happens. All you can control is how you are within. You are capable of keeping this internal chemistry any was you wish. The first step is to start consciously responding instead of reacting.

No matter what life gives you, you must practice making the most of it. But never start toning down your emotion. If you are going to cry, cry fully! Don’t suppress, don’t exaggerate, just cry. If you are laughing, do the same. Just allow yourself to feel and stop micromanaging your emotions.

If you can allow yourself this vulnerability, that you will feel life in all it’s intensity, you will naturally start to burn away the stupid illusions you keep about life that the mind is clinging to.

Yes, there will be sad times, yes there will be happy times. But this isn’t about chasing only the good or enjoying the bad like some masochist. It’s about being vulnerable so that life can penetrate you. If you are to wake up and see what this life truly is, you must let it penetrate you.

The problem is you are too scared to be vulnerable, and too reactive to what life brings. So you want to shut off the vulnerability, curl up into the fetal position, and wait for life to pass by, only popping up when something preferable happens.

Simply start here: that you are allowed to feel how you feel. Allow yourself to feel whatever life brings. Just witness it happening, and allow it to blossom. When the emotion is done, it will pass. This is the correct way to feel, to just let it be. When you try to manage the emotion you wind up attached to it.

Life should be so intense for you that you cry tears of joy when you see a tree, smile fully when you feel the wind, dance when you see the sun, weep when you see someone suffering! You should experience it all in it’s totality.

Does this mean you become some useless person, balling their eyes out every minute? It just means that you are not afraid anymore to feel all this life has to offer. Only one who has no fear to experience life can walk it fully.

If you can live more like this, you will see the emotions themselves are just coming and going. They don’t even need to be managed, just felt and witnessed.

What I am saying is you can feel your feelings without letting them consume you, without becoming them. There is no danger in feeling anything fully, only in denying the feeling. That is where the entanglement lies, like a trap.

Feel your emotions consciously, not compulsively. Let go of the fear to be vulnerable. Watch how where you once felt incapable of making a better life for yourself and others, all of a sudden you see no other way than to make it happen.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Vulnerability

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

I get taken advantage of in life constantly. It’s led me to become very weary and cautious of people and situations. I find myself wanting to just avoid or protect myself from difficult situations. I’ve been vulnerable in the past and it just has caused me so much heartache. Still I’m tired of walking around on eggshells in life all the time. How can I stop being taken advantage of and live my life?

Sincerely,

Disadvantage Point

Dear DP,

What you are asking is impossible. There is no way to be cautious and live life fully. You will only ever be half in, half out.

Do you know how torturous it is to go swimming in a cold lake by only dipping your body in inch by inch? This is what exercising caution is like. You want to swim, but are afraid of the cold water. Rather than dive in totally, you make it into a long and drawn out endeavor. By the time you get in, if you get in at all, the whole process was so unpleasant you will either vow never to try again or you will jump out after not that long.

You say you are being taken advantage of. Indeed, it can feel awful being used. When someone uses you without your consent, that is the worst feeling. Most people consider rape to be a more horrific act than murder. This is simply because you are being forced to endure something you didn’t agree to, and have to live with the aftermath.

Why am I saying all this?

You see, when anything happens to you in life that you didn’t do willingly, it can feel like you are being raped in a way. Your willingness is the only difference between something being rape or not.

Am I trying to say you just roll over to all your bullies and transgressors in life, becoming a willing participant? No, I am saying that the more willing you are in life, the less you will feel the victim.

In a way, life is always taking advantage of you. But not just you. All life takes advantage of all other life. The trees take advantage of your carbon dioxide. You take advantage of their oxygen. But this way of viewing it is a bit narrow. It’s not that you are at a great loss because you let out what they need to breathe. And neither was it a great loss for the trees that you took what you needed.

This is just the nature of life. Sometimes, we are giving. Other times, we are receiving. But tell me, even if right now every tree is exuding oxygen, if you hold your mouth and nose pinched shut, will you get any?

Or let’s say you were afraid to breathe in. For some reason, you have become scared and it has made you cautious of all trees. So you only breathe in the bare minimum, paranoid of what may go wrong. Doesn’t it sound ridiculous?

The truth is, vulnerability is the only way out of your fear. The answer is not to close yourself off more. The answer is not to find some way to be cautious and somehow involved. Those two are not congruent. There is no middle ground for life. You must be all in!

Let me put it this way: How alive you feel in any given moment is equal to how involved you are. Isn’t it that the less involved you are, the less alive you feel? Caution is the path to less involvement, less aliveness.

“But surely true self we must be careful of our survival! We can’t all just go on living with reckless abandon for our safety”

You need to realize that your safety is very rarely ever at risk. We are not fighting for our food and shelter in jungles full of tigers anymore. This is not to say we are never at risk. In fact, your life is never a guarantee. There are no guarantees. This is why being vulnerable is all the more important.

Because life has not guaranteed you anything except that you will die someday, you must learn to live this life as fully as possible.

Deep inside you believe that you will somehow live a long time. You think there is time to be cautious and live inch by inch because you don’t understand that you are mortal. I am telling you to wake up, there is no time except what you have right now.

Sometimes life throws us extremely difficult situations. Sometimes it appears others are to blame for it even. But the external is never within your control. Things will happen. That is life. What you make of it is the only question. If you are willing to be involved, your life has potential. For that you need vulnerability. But if all you want is safety, then caution is the way, but it will fail you in the end.

A seed is made that it can survive almost anything. It can fall from great heights, get run over, become buried…it can endure so much! So resilient. But only if it stays as a seed.

If the seed wants to become the flower, it must drop its hard shell. It must throw caution to the wind and decide to endure unknown difficulties. The soil will be dark, the bedrock hard, the light absent! If it only stayed the seed it could even survive a millennia. But it would never know it’s potential that way.

So the seed chooses vulnerability. To be vulnerable takes courage. Yes, it means you can be taken advantage of. But just as the sprout turns literal shit into a flower’s fragrance, so too can you turn what life gives you into your own beautiful experience. Tell me, would the seed ever become the flower without all that shit? Without all that difficulty?

Being vulnerable does not mean that you seek out difficulty in life, or become some pushover. It means that you realize that unless you are open to all life gives, including the difficult parts – you will never blossom, never realize your true potential.

Believe me when I say you are uniquely beautiful with something no one else has to offer. Caution may give you a long, safe life. But only vulnerability will teach you the quality of your life means far more than the safety of it.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise.

 

On Fear

~ SE ~ 2 Comments

Dear True Self,

I suffer from anxiety. I often get very afraid of how things will turn out and it prevents me from taking action in my life. I even find that at times I might say something just to please someone even if it’s not how I really feel or what I really wanted to say. Anxiety is so crippling and I hate the idea of taking medications. I want a solution, not something to mask it. How can I stop being so afraid and overcome my fears?

Sincerely,

Afraid and Anxious

 

Dear AAA,

So many people suffer from anxiety. If you look at society, it is rapidly increasing as a diagnosis in people, especially in the west. More and more people are taking medication for this. But as you said, the medicine is only a mask, not the solution.

Have you ever cooked something in your home, opened the oven door, then a few moments later….

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP!!!!

The alarm goes off. So what do you do? You run over to the alarm and turn it off. But you probably need to realize your oven needs cleaning.

Taking medication for anxiety and other such diseases in today’s society often means just turning off the alarm, which is the signal your body is sending you to take care of your mental health. If you just ignore the signal, the gunk will build up inside of you, just as it does in that oven, and the signal will just go off more and more often.

But you’ve discovered a solution! Just take out the batteries from the alarm! No more beeping! This is essentially what signal inhibiting medication is accomplishing. Though it may give you a reprieve from the loud beeping, it will not give you a way to improve your mental health or to be rid of the fear.

I don’t say this to shame people who are on medication. If it helps them, then I am all for it. But treat it as a life preserver – it will help you stay afloat. While afloat, use the help to find a solution so you don’t need to be medicated endlessly.

Let’s take a look at how your anxiety functionally works.

Anxiety is like a roller coaster ride. You are slowly climbing up the roller coaster, and enjoying the view as you go. But as you get higher and higher, you get more and more tense, as you know an equally large fall is about to come. And at the top, right before the fall – that is the hardest part, as you can see exactly how steep it is. But now it’s too late, you can’t get off. In order to avoid this cycle, you will say or do almost anything as you mentioned, but avoiding will not solve your problem.

First you must realize, there is no such thing as fear.

That’s not super useful, but I say it so you can understand a fundamental truth about existence: All your emotions are merely energy, they just have a chemical basis. This includes fear. All energy is just LIFE energy manifesting in countless ways. If you are willing to practice, you can transform even fear into joy, happiness, pleasure…whatever you want. But how to do that, especially when you feel crippled by anxiety?

Right now, you are compulsively reacting with fear – that same intensity you put into compulsively reacting, if you just consciously turn it around into joy or pleasantness, it too will blossom with the same intensity. The only reason fear has taken such a hold of you is that you have practiced it much more than joy.

People often don’t want to believe that life is simple. It truly is. You want to be happy? Just practice it! You see, you have two clear choices:

React to life and your survival mechanism will dictate everything, mainly from a place of fear,

OR

Respond to life consciously, the way you want to.

Yes, it will be difficult at first. I said it’s simple, but it’s not always easy. But you must start to practice. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is acting even in spite of fear. You do not need to go headfirst into your fears to conquer them. You can, nothing wrong with doing it that way – but this way can be painful. If you just find the courage to smile when afraid, be grateful for what you have, forgive yourself…things will turn around. At first, it will take a moment. The fear may have a stranglehold – but if you just keep consciously choosing to be pleasant, or to handle the fear with some amount of grace, eventually it will turn around, and start moving in a more useful direction for you.

Your fear serves no one, least of all you. If it rears its head, don’t give it so much importance. Simply treat it like a smoke alarm, reminding you to clean your oven. The way to clean it is to smile and practice your joy and pleasantness. You need it most of all in moments like that.

There are many other things that can help you of course. A practice that helps bring calm, stillness, and peace to the mind needs to become a daily occurrence in people’s lives. We live in a society that is always flooring the gas pedal. Without a daily stillness practice, no amount of “trying to be happy” will help you. In spite of all I just said, you will struggle a lot when afraid to choose pleasantness.

Meditation and yoga asanas (postures) are a tried and tested way to calm the mind. Not only that, a daily practice will monumentally increase your capability in handling stress and bring a sense of ease to life.

It may not be what you wanted to hear, but the gist of it is this:

Your mind is not taking instructions from you. If you want it to start, then you have to consciously, patiently, in as many moments as you can remember to, practice choosing joy. Choosing the way you want your inner world to be.

The mind is a wonderful servant and a terrible master. Take the reins.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise.