HOW DO YOU REALLY FEEL?

I was confronted by a person yesterday who I could tell was mad as hell. Every non-verbal sign that his body gave off, convinced me of it. Yet, when I tried to get him to calm down, he tried to convince me that he wasn’t mad. The craziest thing is that I really think that he believed that he wasn’t mad. I explained to him something I learned years ago and it seemed to make him much more self-aware of his true self. I always thought that many people knew this, but found many who don’t. I figure that this is important to pass on.

For a long time I always had a problem really knowing what my true feeling were at any given moment. This became important to me because my emotions very easily made a lot of choices for me without spending the time to really think ‘Is this a good idea?’. The illusion is that when you surrender to your emotions, you feel the most free - when in fact you are being controlled by them. Many times my thinking mind was not truly aware of how I was really feeling, because ‘It doesn’t make sense that I should feel this way’.

Feelings don’t have to make sense to you conscious thinking mind - many times they are based on instincts and subconscious beliefs that we have no voluntary control over. The brain is actually hard-wired this way as a survival trait. Many times one needs to react too quickly to waste time to think about what to do. It works good in many life-and death situations but stinking thinking in your subconscious beliefs can lead to many unhealthy feelings. Believe it or not, there is a part of the brain that controls emotions that has its own self-contained memory - completely separate from our main memory. Many strong emotional responses from our past are stored there. Many of these are negative emotions and not even based on healthy thinking. Maybe you mother locked you in your room when you were 3 years old for being bad. You were in terror from this - now years later you might acquire strong feelings of fear that prevent you from admitting some present bad action.

Here I go moving way off topic again when all I wanted to do was do a short post. Here’s my trick to being aware of how I truly feel at any moment-

Don’t try to use your thinking mind to determine how you feel. Many times it will tell you wrong.
Become aware off what your body is doing. Like I said, most emotions are hard-wired to the body without passing through the thinking mind first. Learn to become ware of how your body reacts to certain emotions. Anger might cause your heart to race, or your muscles may tighten up. Sadness might make your stomach sick. Severe depression might cause you to sleep a lot. Manic moods might make you feel invincible and give you excess energy.

Learn to realize that your true feelings can be determined by what state your body is in - not by how you think you feel.