The Powers Within Us

Opinion

In the last weeks I can say that I had to deal,with so many different and powerful emotions and feelings such as frustration, guilt, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, pity, indignation, shame, love, remorse, terror, grief, annoyance, disapproval, gratefulness, contempt, optimism, and happiness. Some of them came and went away, others never left, and sometimes they overlapped, creating really great emotional discomfort. My biggest question and worry about it was: how was I going to handle them so that I can still stay true to myself, and not be unpleasant company for the people around me?

Well, what I realized with a little help from a very dear person is that we rarely take the time to focus on the sensation that these emotions bring into our body. We are educated to repress, suppress or have a negative attitude towards the “bad” feelings, some of which I just enumerated in my first paragraph.

But what if instead of investing energy in trying to stop them, we accept them, and we say to ourselves that they make us who we are. But how can we accept them for real and not just in theory? We let them be. As we let happiness, love, and joy be.

So, for example, if you are feeling angry, sad, frustrated, or afraid, don’t say to yourself: “I can’t be sad right now” or “People shouldn’t see that I am afraid” and then find different ways to throw this into your subconscious. It’s not a solution, it’s just a bandage for the moment. Instead, you can allow yourself to be afraid and angry and sad. And you can let these feelings invade you.

Stop putting up barriers. Once you let all your feelings in and you focus only on them, they will be, and they will reach a high intensity, but after that, they will be gone for good. At least they will no longer become attached with the thought that accompanied them.

This exercise doesn’t take more than three minutes. What is the feeling afterward? Liberation. You will start to understand the true meaning of freedom because you won’t be afraid anymore to be sad, for example.

I remember that my friend told me that I should try every morning to call out all the emotions I would normally run away from.

And my first thought was: “Is she crazy? Why would I do that? Why would I risk ruining my whole day?” And why did I had this reaction and these questions? Because fear was born. Fear that I wouldn’t be able to let them be so that they can get drained, and instead they will stick with me for the whole day at least, and then I would have to make my way through them with difficulty.

Then I did the exercise, working on the fear of not being able to complete the exercise. I inhaled and I said “Fear, I let you be”and as it was building up in its most natural and beautiful form, I thought to myself “This is not as bad as I thought it would be”. So, as this fear caused by the thought of trying this every morning faded, the next morning I started my day by feeling everything that was inside me and was trying to ignore for so long. It was intense, I won’t lie, but the outcome was amazing. I ended up finally having a good day, something that I hadn’t had for a long time.

But of course, sometimes emotions don’t appear out of the blue. As I also mentioned above, they become attached with our thoughts. And in many cases thoughts are what produce them. And if you have the power to control and change your negative thoughts into positive ones, that is simply great.

But what do you do when you have too many thoughts, and they get mixed up? When you feel that you are losing control over them and they end up governing you? You rise above them. You don’t try to stop them because the harder you try and don’t succeed, the higher the level of your frustration will be and you will feel lost.

Imagine you are on a plane and you are looking out of the window and you see the platform of clouds under you. The clouds are your thoughts.

You have to step outside of your mind (I know it sounds tricky) and become a spectator. A spectator doesn’t have any part in a show, he’s just there to observe and enjoy himself. You have to feel the same. You can pay attention to how thoughts come and go and what feeling they evoke in you. Once you identify that feeling, let it be. Do the exercise. When you finish, bring that thought back. This time the thought should be empty, without any baggage. It should be an innocent thought that is just there. Harmless.

Look what beautiful powers we have. It would be a pity not to take advantage of them and be happy.

Credits

Image	Title	Author	License
	The powers within us	Leandro Neumann Ciuffo	CC BY 2.0