Don't think, Feel!

 Hi!

Welcome back. It is Monday morning. I hope you had a good weekend. I traveled in the last month and interacted with people about their work.

One of the lovely things a privilege of staying in a national institute is that I chat with many different people. I get to hear from a lot of people. Often about the personal aspects of their life.

Yesterday I was talking to someone who had been feeling particularly frustrated and irritable for quite some time.
So they asked me how to work with it and how to approach it, and I asked them in turn, What was the cause of the frustration? What was the cause of the anger? And the response back was interesting. They said, "because I feel grumpy, and I don't like feeling grumpy. I am angry that I am grumpy."
What is being grumpy is other than frustration and irritability itself?
And as we unpacked it, we got to the point of discussing his feeling angry about feeling angry. We do this a lot as human beings. We feel anxious about feeling anxious. We feel sad about feeling sad. You maybe recognize this in your own life. We do it all the time. And there is a reason we do it. I will talk about it later. But without the thoughts, thinking, and engagement of thinking, we need to fuel the emotion with our thinking to sort of maintaining it to keep it alive. But we don't always realize that's what is happening (Maybe people with recent heartbreaks will relate how they keep thinking about some moments). The mind is quite tricky, and it gets into this pattern where it actually uses the anxiety to create more thinking so that we are actually thinking about the anxiety, we are fuelling the anxiety. We are anxious about our own anxiety. And in this case, he was angry about feeling angry and frustrated about feeling frustrated.

I don't know If you have ever noticed this when you experience a strong negative emotion, it really tends to increase the feeling of identity. I am furious, or I am really sad, or really anxious. That feeling of I, me, and myself gets stronger. It's almost as though the ego has its sort of moment. However, misguided, however, misplace we feel somewhat empowered with it. So naturally, the tendency is to move back towards that to try and maintain that feeling( However absurd may it sound). If you compare that to a time in life where there are no strong feelings, I don't necessarily feel quite as empowered. It doesn't feel quite strong; everything feels sort of stable (Think of fun times, your trips, etc..). So it is interesting just to notice how in those moments, we tend to identify with them very strongly. Although we might feel empowered, it actually causes us harm.
In engaging in the thinking around that emotion, we actually fuel that emotion. We either increase its intensity or increase its duration.

 If we can see that pattern when it's happening and disengage with those thoughts, just allowing them to come and go, not suppressing them, just allowing them to come and go. Then we can watch as that emotion subside, as the fire begins to die out.

I hope it helped you today and in the upcoming days.

Thanks for visiting. I hope to see you soon.