Feeling bad is not relegated to the intense, depressing, heart wrenching pain or the despairing distress that leads us to make poor choices or do things that hurt ourselves. Feeling bad can be as simple as not liking the moment, not wanting to be with yourself as you are right now, feeling lost or lonely or disconnected.
These are all the most normal human emotions that visit everyone from time to time. What trips most of us up is when we attribute those bad feelings to something or someone in our life. When we mistakenly believe that other people, places or things have the power to create bad feelings inside of us, we innocently intensify our bad feeling because we start thinking and thinking and thinking about “the thing” that we believe is responsible for our feeling.
In those moments it doesn’t seem like bad feelings visit from time to time. It seems like they took up residence. But for the power of Thought, there is no residence.
My desire to check my phone, emails, texts, Facebook, Instagram, eat, drink, shop on the internet, or any other behavior I do to escape uncomfortable feelings is really a misunderstanding of what uncomfortable feelings are. If I believe they are something to escape, then all those behaviors make a lot of sense.
What if there wasn’t a need to get away from them though? What if they passed on their own? What if those feelings didn’t mean what we believe them to mean about us or how we are doing in life? What if they were just energy taking form in a feeling (that I just decided was not ok) but actually is completely ok.
What if I am ok no matter what, no matter how bad I’m feeling in this moment? If I weren’t judging myself and my experience constantly, I wouldn’t feel so bad, as we are living in the feeling of our thinking.
We are not who we think we are. We are not limited by our self-concepts, yet we can feel that we are if we believe that we are. When we see the truth about bad feelings…that they are a temporary thought creation, not the truth about who we are, how we are doing or what other people think of us…in that space, all of the thinking we have about ourselves can fall away. When it does, feeling bad probably won’t feel as bad.
