It is so important to understand ourselves. To know WHAT WE FEEL. To recognise various emotional states against our emotional equilibrium.
I call emotional equilibrium 'CALM ZERO', or state of an inner peace. It is a state to which all my other emotional states can be compared. Running into PLUS on a pleasant emotional scale - towards excitement and joy, or into the MINUS on an unpleasant side - towards sadness and depression.
We should be able to recognise WHERE on our 'emotional barometer' we are at any given moment. The more we practice awareness of our emotions, the more skilful we become in identifying how we feel. Easy!
But is it?
Our emotional states are a REACTION to the outside world through the energy of our thoughts and beliefs about it. If our thoughts are negative, so are our emotions. If our beliefs are false, so is our reality.
Our emotional state directly relates to our perceptions, our emotions are directly connected to how we see things. How we see things is shaped by what we believe about situations, others, and ourselves. These are called filters. We all have them. They are called filters as they DISTORT the reality, the Truth, and make it OUR reality - our truth. This is why there are many people of many different opinions, which seem perfectly valid to them from where they are standing.
Our filters are SHAPED by our childhood experiences, cultural and society influences.
Throughout life we manage to collect rather a large filter system: our belief system.
The older our beliefs, the more subconscious and less aware we are about them. Living consciously, mindfully, or to AWAKEN, means we go through a process of making our unconscious beliefs conscious. Making them accessible to questioning and having the power to change them, so that we ACT out of our conscious decisions, rather than RE-ACT out of our unconscious beliefs.
Our earliest beliefs laid into our subconscious are about ourselves and the people who were representing our world at the time - our family.
When a belief is formed, its truth largely depends on WHO is 'looking' - on how much experience with viewing such person has, how much knowledge about the situation and people involved he/she has. For this reason alone, majority of our early beliefs are false.
Yes, you heard me, what we believe about ourselves is NOT TRUE.
Who we THINK we are (and are not) rules us, without us being aware of it.
So how false our beliefs really are? And how can we tell?
There is a reliable way....
What we believe about ourselves, very much and truthfully, reflects in how we live our life, and what kind of relationships we engage in.
Are your relationships loving, caring and respectful? Or are they disrespectful and abusive?
Look at your partner for example, look at how you let him/her treat you. Look at how you let your children/parents treat you.
What you allow others do to you directly reflects your belief of how you should be treated.
Consciously you say: 'No way! I know I deserve to be treated well!'
No...not really. Because if you TRULY believed it, you would have never allowed any sort of abuse or disrespect towards yourself, truly believing that you are deserving NOTHING BUT KIND behaviour.
Having broken down all the false beliefs about us being bad and unworthy, knowing and feeling deeply that we don't deserve nothing but loving care, is called self-love. It is based on a conscious choice to love and accept oneself, rather than subconsciously believe what we have told ourselves about us (or what others told us) long long time ago.
In toxic and co-dependent relationships, BOTH partners involved subconsciously believe that they are not loveable, that they are NOT WORTHY, hence others can treat them the way they 'deserve'.
Look at what your partner lets you do to him/her. How he/she allows you to abuse him/her?
Our subconscious beliefs directly translate into our actions towards ourselves, and others.
They do NOT translate into our thoughts however, spoken or unspoken. Hence what we say about who we are, or who we want to be, isn't a true reflection of our beliefs. Unless we have dealt with our false belief structure of course! We think we know who we are, how we should be treated, how we want to treat others, but do we??
Our conscious thoughts do not quite MATCH our subconscious beliefs. We want to be kind but we are not, we want to be loving but we are not. We fail to deliver with best intentions because we don't rule our actions. Our beliefs are!
IF we fail in observation of the architecture of our false belief structure, if we fail in digging deep into the landscape of our filters, we will find it hard to get to know HOW we feel, and WHY.
IF we prefer to hide from our emotional pain, we won't discover what shapes our reality, and why we feel miserable.
When I searched for the reasons for wanting to be in a relationship, for example, I realised I was scared of NOT being a part of an alliance.
Prior to that I didn't know anything about myself. I wasn't aware what drives my 'wants', hence I wasn't able to do anything with the fear behind them - apart from seeking to soothe myself and run away from feeling my fear by wanting to be in A relationship, just for the sake of BEING WITH SOMEONE.
I realised that behind my escape INTO a relationship wasn't only the fear of loneliness, but also some basic false beliefs about myself. Like believing I wasn't good enough - capable and smart enough to make it on my own; that I wasn't loveable enough, which reflected directly in the kind of men I run into, who treated me with disrespect and lack of care.
They abused me because:
1/ I let them. I believed I deserve nothing better due to how I have been treated as a child.
2/ They honestly believed I deserved it. They themselves were insecure, believing that they are not worthy of a loving care. They believed abuse and drama IS love; and because I believed the same they let me abuse them back.
We believe we ARE bad because we were treated badly, hence deserving bad treatment from others. This is why young delinquents typically come from abusive families. They DO bad to reinforce what they believe about themselves.
Do you see how we shape our reality?
Do you understand how we attract that we BELIEVE WE ARE? Do you see how our actions in life reflect who we THINK we are?
We are in a job we dislike because we believe we are not worthy a better one: one with a kinder boss, one we would truly enjoy.
We are stuck in a toxic relationship full of neglect and drama because we believe our abusers are the best we could ever find, that we don't deserve to be loved and cared for, that we would not be enough for someone who is genuinely confident, intelligent, authentic, emotionally healthy.
We like to PAIR, fearing we are too weak and incapable of making it on our own. We like to couple with people who have a low self-esteem like us.
We like to seek company of similarly wounded Souls because only then we feel equal. Equally pretending. Equally miserable. Equally asleep, unconsciously acting from our false beliefs of not being enough.
See how our 'emotional base' is set by the beliefs we hold about ourselves in our early life?
We feel so bad about ourselves and we are not even aware of it!?
No wonder we find it so hard to spend time in solitude, frantically seeking distractions with people, work, drugs, alcohol to numb the pain. Numbing the emotional dis-ease of the ONLY person we are stuck with for the rest of our life.... this is how loving we are towards ourselves :(
The solution to our fundamental emotional misery is actually very simple.
We have to stop practicing the NUMBING and start practicing the FEELING. We have to aim to re-connect with ourselves.
The only way to change our displeasure and irritability with who we think we are is to re-connect with our pain. On the path to finding who we truly are, shedding beliefs of who we are NOT, we enable the calibration of our emotional barometer by finding our equilibrium point - our inner peace.
Thank you for reading. If my article contributed to understanding yourself, please be generous and share it with others.
Copyright © 2016 Michaela Patel