I had my most random trip ever couple days ago. With a friend of mine, we booked a flight ticket to San Andres island two hours before departure, and ran to the airport to catch the flight. Which we accomplished successfully and had an amazing adventure for 3 days there.
I recorded a video blog on a subject which inevitably comes up in my coaching conversations with people, as once a person gets a deeper insight into this their whole reality changes.
So I wanted to cover this in a video, which I haven’t done before yet. Usually I love having this conversation with a person / group of people, and go deeper until they start to get it, but I’m experimenting now with putting this into writing and video on my site.
Whenever I start working with a person I ask myself the question: “Does this person know where his feelings come from?”
The reason I ask that question is because so many times we get caught up in frustration or suffering about some situations in our lives. Things happen in our lives, and we have feelings. Our brain links them together.
I feel angry/sad/frustrated/depressed or joyful/happy/safe because of this situation.
Someone might say
- “I am so stressed and frustrated because of this traffic jam.”
- “I am angry and frustrated because I lost in the poker session.”
- “I feel frustrated because the variance is against me.”
- “I feel pissed because that person said that to me.”
- and so on..
We have a certain feeling inside us, and we link it to a situation/event outside.
But our feelings just show what kind of thinking we have in the moment.
If we feel stressed and frustrated, that means we have stressful and frustrating thoughts in our mind that seem real.
If we are angry, we have angry thoughts.
If we are happy, we have happy thoughts.
Our mind might look like a camera, taking a snapshot of the situation out there, and then that’s what we feel.
However our mind is more like a projector. It projects out our thoughts in the moment, and colors the reality, and then that’s the reality we experience. Either happy or sad.
Just like in a cinema. There is the canvas, and the movie is projected onto it, and when you are lost in the movie you experience it fully, you feel an emotional roller coaster. But it is just projected onto a white canvas.
Similar to life. Imagine everything as neutral, a white canvas. And our mind colors that canvas, and paints our own personal reality.
That’s why the same situation can happen to two people and they experience it totally differently. Even the same person can experience the same situation differently at times.
Has it ever happened to you that you had a losing session and you felt pissed, and devastated?
And an other time you had a losing session and felt calm, positive, even upbeat?
Maybe you thought you played well, and you were proud of yourself, even if you lost in the session.
Because things don’t have the power to cause us to feel a certain way. Cars in a traffic jam don’t have the power to make us feel angry and pissed. Numbers on a computer showing the result of a session, which are just pixels, don’t have the power to cause us a certain way.
Think about it for a moment. Nothing out there has the power to make you feel certain feelings.
100% of our feelings come from thought in the moment.
That’s the difference between the inside-out vs. the outside-in understanding.
From an outside-in paradigm it looks like ‘my feelings come from things other than thought in the moment (events, situations, circumstance…)’
And that’s a misunderstanding. It was never true, no matter how much it looks like at times.
From an inside-out paradigm we see that ‘100% of my feelings come from thought in the moment.’ My experience in life happens from within.
The more we see that our thinking changes naturally, and so do our feelings, the less we try to manage our outer circumstances, or our thinking/feeling state (when someone gets into self-help). We realize that we are feeling thought in the moment, and we don’t have to change it, fight it, control it. It naturally changes, comes and goes, like clouds in the sky.
We don’t have to think positive thoughts, and get rid of negative thoughts. We just see them as thoughts.
Our experience of life can become more fluid. If we understand and see that our suffering in the moment is not coming from the situation or my circumstances or a potential future, but is coming from our thinking in the moment that seems real, we can wake up easier from that illusion, and get back to our default well-being.
That’s our default nature, we are well. And we just think ourselves out from that innate well-being, which we were born with.
When our mind quiets down, we naturally return to that state of clarity. We feel more secure, peaceful, and well. We access more of our innate wisdom, and the right action to take can appear to us.
So let these ideas settle down within you, and see what comes up for you.
Feel free to share your insights, and comments below.