Ever been in love and seen everyone in love around you?
Ever felt blue and seen only sadness around you?
Our thoughts are constantly colored by our emotions… but we usually don’t realize that. Why? Because our minds don’t want us to. They pretend to be neutral observers… but hardly ever are.
Our rational minds like to ignore feelings, simply because they doesn’t know what to do with them. They don’t know how to feel them… that’s the heart’s job. All the mind can do is protect us from feeling emotions… after all, that’s why we hired it.
As long as the mind can convince us that the world isn’t fair, that we shouldn’t have to feel certain feelings, it has a job. It assures us that we need it to safeguard us from danger. Then it “helps” us by filtering out facts, misinterpreting events, and pushing us to avoid certain people or situations that it says are threatening. It also plans big, safe dream-castles, future havens where we will never need to feel scared again.
And so we live our lives in fight-or-flight mode, believing the mind’s interpretation of events… and bouncing around like a pinball.
But neither other people nor external situations can ever make us feel emotions. We already feel them… we just don’t allow them, we don’t feel safe feeling them. That’s we keep running to the mind for protection… like a child. And the mind does the only thing it can: it finds a scapegoat.
Those buried emotions will forever sit inside us… coloring everything we think about the world… until we feel them. The mind can only create imaginary “enemies” and “allies,” “happy places” and “safe spaces” for so long, all to no avail. Until we realize that feelings are the real drivers here – not events – we are doomed to fear and victimhood.
So let’s stop believing we need the mind to save us, and face the real dragon… inside. Once we accept those unwanted feelings of abandonment, loneliness, unworthiness and helplessness – really feel them – we can finally stop uselessly fighting all those windmills… on the outside.
Joy Biscuits 