Happy 2017 everybody!!
Here’s a good way to start the year. This is something that truly changed the way I live my daily life.
In one sentence: ‘I live in the feeling’. It sounds weird, right? But that’s what I do. I don’t focus on the mind and thoughts; I don’t focus on the outside world nor the body. My focus is the feeling.
We live in a society, the West at least, where only the mind is important. We are all head and no heart, as the Dalai Lama once said. I started a journey that is so much rewarding. Shifting the focus to my feelings is making my life so much more colourful!!
I have to admit, the beginning is not easy. It’s very confronting. There are some feelings that you just want to escape. They feel too strong to bear. But the more you do it, the easier and more rewarding it gets. Believe me.
Being able to deal with your feelings will help you solving so many issues, both personal and professional. Where you saw a problem and conflict before, now you see an opportunity to grow.
Think it this way: we are like computers. When we are born we are ’empty’. The environment (our parents, experiences that we do, etc,…) gives us the first programs, the ones we need for our survival. The people we learn this info from, our programmers, are key in this phase. For example, if they worry all the time, they program us with that worry. We are animals that learn by imitation. So, by 3 years of age, we have a set of programs based mainly on the ones handed down by our family. Then we evolve in life, we become more complex. But, basically, we never update those old programs!! It’s like having an Atari from the 80’s instead of the latest Mac! Which one do you think would work better?
That’s what I am doing now: reprogramming my system. How?
If you want to use just your thoughts, it would take ages. You noticed how, when you start a thought, another will follow and then another and soon you find yourself lost in a trail of thoughts and you don’t even remember where you started? That’s a good indication that it is not the right path. Following the method indicated by David Hawkins in the book ‘Power vs Force’, I am facing my feelings instead. The reason is because at the root of every program there is a feeling. We attached a feeling or emotion to everything we learnt. So if we want to act on our programs we need to go to the root of them. They are like the foundation of a house of cards: you remove one of the bottom cards and all the house will collapse. It is the same principle with the mind: tackle the feeling, look straight into its eyes, ‘feel’ with no fear until it’s gone. It will be unnatural at the beginning, I know. But it’s because we are not used to it and no one ever told us how to do it (that would be a good program to teach a kid!!). According to Carl G. Jung, we deal with our feelings by repressing, suppressing or escaping. We are so used to do this that, facing the feeling just seems absurd. ‘Why do I have to suffer?’, we think. It’s like when someone put a sad song on. Everyone would ask: why did you choose a sad song and not a happy one? We are scared of certain feelings and we escape them in every possible manner. Now, we live in a time when escapism is probably the main motto! You have entertainment everywhere. You have it in your pocket right now. As soon as a certain feeling comes up what do you do? You pick up the phone and check the latest on Facebook! My friend, try this method. Feel! Next time, I will tell you what to do if the feeling is an uncomfortable one.
Congratulations! You are on the right path to re-program yourself.
Love!