Do you ever feel lost? I don’t mean the kind where you are driving and you don’t know where you are, so you let the Waze redirect you. I mean the kind where you feel out of sorts, somewhat disconnected, lacking motivation or direction.
That’s how I feel today. It’s so funny how I found myself walking around aimlessly, checking the pantry a few times and thinking “schools over, summer’s finally started, the day is grey and drab, I’ve got an empty schedule today and I’m not interested in writing my blog post today. No wonder I feel lost.”
Then as I munched on a chip I realized, “Duh! That’s not why I feel lost” Those are just excuses to try and explain away this particular feeling. I feel lost because of Thought in the moment. All of the sudden I got hit with the idea I could do lost!
Why do I have to try to eat it away or busy myself with something to read or do. I could just feel lost. You know, it’s funny, when we give ourselves permission to just feel, at some point the feeling passes. I’ve been in and out of it most of the day, but in this moment, I had this motivated feeling to write this blog post.
Nothing ground breaking to share, but the familiar insight that we all feel different things at different times and it’s a bit of a waste of time and energy to try to figure out or blame something for why we feel what we feel. We feel what we think. When our thinking changes, so do our feelings.
My take away is that I don’t have to run away from feeling lost, disconnected, out of sorts. It’s just a thought-created experience. Doesn’t mean anything about me, or my relationship to Hashem or my ability to be successful. And I’ll feel it until I don’t. Period.
That actually took a lot of my mind. No more judgment, expectations or self-pity. Thanks for listening.
My question is when you think anxiety or you constantly fear your feelings it feels awful and you don’t feel like yourself…what do you do? I realize it’s thoughts but I’m addicted to being upset about feeling awful. Where do you go from there?
I love your line “I’m addicted to being upset about feeling awful.” The truth is, even though you say you realize it’s thought, if it’s still scaring you, then it’s more an intellectual knowing it’s thought than an insighful realization. Knowing it’s thought wouldn’t be scary. Uncomfortable, yes, but not scary. Being “addicted” is just another way of saying I take my thinking really seriously and believe it’s a problem to feel awful. What if feeling awful wasn’t a problem? Unfortunately resisting the feeling innocently makes it persist because it takes thought to resist it which perpetuates the bad feeling. When I said “I could do lost” I meant I could be ok feeling not ok in the lost feeling trusting that the thought/feeling will pass eventually. (Unless I don’t believe it will pass and then I will live in the thought created experience that thought doesn’t pass and it will seem like I’m addicted to being upset about feeling awful.)
I LOVED what you wrote! And so funny how we really believe our “teich” on our feelings. I’ve been convinced the past few days that my good feeling is because school is over and I DON’T have a schedule and that my “lostness” before school was over was because my schedule was too tight with too much to do! Go Figure!
Well, I’m happy you had some lost feelings today, because we benefited from your insights!
Thank you. What a great reminder that it’s NEVER the circumstance!