Most of us walk around ignoring or dismissing how we feel. And yet we are driven by our emotions. So just as becoming aware of what you think is incredibly powerful, so is becoming aware of how you feel. And there are many important reasons to be acutely aware of how you are feeling at any moment.
To begin with, your emotions are the sole determiner of whether you feel good or feel bad. And that’s basically the whole show when it comes to the value of and reason for living, so that’s reason enough to pay attention to what you are feeling. After all, when you are feeling good, the question of whether being alive is worth it or not disappears altogether. Happiness is its own answer when you’re in it. However when you have forgotten what it is like to feel good, you wonder why you are living in the first place.
As well, unlike your thoughts which can lie just as well as speak the truth, your emotions are 100% faithful to the truth – they are the ultimate detector of what is truly going on with you, regardless of what you might be saying to yourself. Any gay person who has ever said to themselves and others, “I’m straight,” but felt totally aroused by the same sex nonetheless, knows this truth very well.
What this tells us is that we are in the closet about much more than just our sexuality. We are in the closet about what we believe, how we truly feel, and what is going on with us. This means that straight people are in the closet too. Though this is a revolutionary and mostly unconsidered concept at the moment, as the human consciousness evolves in the next few decades, it will be become commonly accepted. And the idea that it is just gay people who go into the closet will be as antiquated a notion as racially segregated water fountains.
This conflict between what we tell ourselves and how we really feel manifests in innumerable facets to our personality because we are all inundated with programming about who we should be, rather than encouragement to know and be who we truly are. So not only are emotions that feel good the very goal we truly seek in life, they are also the gateway to the truth within us.
But there is another reason to be aware of how you are feeling, and that is the unique and over all effect of emotions on your life.
There are two primary results of emotions: they either heal, nourish and energize you, or poison, wound and diminish you.
“Good” emotions, which is to say emotions that feel good because they are derived from the love within you, such as joy, happiness, fulfillment, optimism, and humor (which is in its own way a distinct emotion) are uplifting to your entire system. They heal your mind, your psyche, and your body, and then extend out to heal your relationships, your career, your finances, and every other element to your life. “Good” emotions are quite literally the ultimate alchemy – they transmute what is sick, tired and dark into what is healthy, energized and bright. Just one drop of an emotion that is agreeable to you can dramatically heal what ails you in an instant. If you’ve ever been distraught in one moment, and made to laugh in another, or felt incredibly sick in one moment and then jumped out of your bed driven by a burst of happiness, you know what I’m talking about.
“Bad” emotions, which are emotions that feel bad because they are derived from fear, such as anger, anxiety, frustration, depression, and judgment bring down every element of your experience. This includes the intangible such as your sense of energy, enthusiasm and passion for what you are doing at any moment, and the tangible such as the health of your body, your finances, and how well you relate to the people in your life. What “bad” emotions do, in a nutshell, is create illness in every facet of your life, and just one drop can poison your system instantaneously. If you’ve ever been having a wonderful time with someone close and then suddenly felt like you hated them because of something they said, or been totally enjoying yourself on vacation until the thought of a problem came to mind and completely stressed you out, then you know from which I speak.
Emotions are the ultimate force which reach out from your inner being and create your experience in the physical and non physical realm. Though we have been raised to believe, for instance, that your body acts on its own and either is sick or healthy depending on circumstances outside of your control, in fact it is the opposite. Your emotions create what your body experiences – the second you feel depressed emotionally, your body responds with a total lack of energy. The more you stay in that state, the more likely you are to invite viruses, disabilities, diseases, and injury because your system has been weakened by depression. And this isn’t an abstract concept that requires that you believe it – simply measure your physical energy level when you are laughing very hard or totally moved by beautiful music to when you are totally afraid and in a state of great anxiety. The result of emotions on the body is immediate, and cumulative.
Similarly, the result of emotions on what seems to be “out there” in your life can just as easily be observed. When you are in a state of love with yourself, you are very much in love with those around you, and your relationships are healthy as a result. When you are in a state of judgment against yourself and fear that you aren’t good enough, your relationships become toxic because you will naturally blame others for how you feel, or worship or resent them for being so much better than you. Either way, it will hurt to be around them, and your relationship will turn into one of pain. If you feel poor, you will be. If you feel ugly, you are. If you feel like a failure, so be it.
Emotions are all powerful in the determination of what kind of life you are living – one that is healthy and getting healthier, one that is sick and getting sicker, or one that is in conflict between the two. Emotions either make you well, or they poison you. Everything that happens in your physical self, your psyche, and in the tangible world around you are simply tools to reflect and magnify the emotions you feel. In other words, if you feel terrible, this emotion will call on every element of your life to express it. If you feel wonderful, this emotion will also call on the entire radius of what you call you – from what you see in your mind and what the world looks like to you to the general well being of your body and your overall life situation – to bring it to life. In a nutshell, the entire Cosmos is simply a tool of your own personal emotions.
The ultimate lesson is that you have the power to elevate or destroy yourself with how you feel, because how you feel stems from one place, and one place only: your thoughts. No other entity or force in all of existence can interfere with the power of your thought to create your emotions, or with the innate power of your emotions to create heaven in and all around you, or to create hell.
If you, like everyone, have been trained to think that you have no control over your emotions, and to dismiss your thoughts because they do not matter (or worse because you don’t acknowledge they exist) and you still whole heartedly believe this, then the idea that it behooves you to pay close attention to how you are feeling is not something you will be able to consider at this time. And in that condition you will truly live passively as you are tossed about by the wild beast your mind and emotions will become, and your only coping mechanisms will be the high of addictions — to sex, money, status, whatever — the numbing effect of anti depressants, drugs and alcohol, the perverse satisfaction from conflict, the deluded treasure of greed, and the ultimate goal of suicide. In short, you will live as an individual in the same general state of unconscious misery and frustration the world as a whole primarily resides in today.
So remember this: pay attention to your emotions because your emotions are the complete and total trustworthy barometer of what thoughts you are thinking, which means that you can become aware of your thoughts by paying attention to your emotions, and if you don’t like them, change them. With a simple change of thought, you will change your emotions, and thus your entire Cosmos. And nothing will ever be able to interfere with or diminish that power.
In the process you will discover your ultimate power as the only Creator there is. You.