Written by Isobel

What’s wrong with “negative” emotions?

I was looking at my stash of personal development books and resources and it dawned on me that every one of them, in one way or another, is focused on how to overcome, process or in some way transmute “negative” emotions. How to love yourself more, find inner peace, overcome anxiety, do it despite the fear, dance with anger, embrace resistance, change your limiting beliefs … or is that just my bookshelf?

Why are some emotions considered “negative” and to be avoided? Obviously, feelings like anger and depression make us feel bad – but why? How are they essentially different from love and gratitude? Abraham-Hicks has been telling us for over 20 years “feelings are your guidance system”. They’re indicators of what we’ve just been thinking or what we habitually think.

Maybe we’re trying to master something new and we’re having problems. We go from “I don’t understand this” (which is true, at least at the moment) to “I’m so stupid and useless, I can’t do anything!“, which can’t possibly be true when we look at our life as a whole.

Isn’t it true that negative emotions upset us because in that moment, we believe the thoughts that created them? If some random stranger called me stupid for no obvious reason, I wouldn’t believe it and I wouldn’t get upset. However if *I*, or someone I cared about or respected said it, I might. It would feel “true”. I could go further and say “you upset me” or “you made me angry“, but a short time later I wouldn’t feel angry or upset anymore, because my thinking would have moved on.

So who or what really upset me? A random thought that triggered a random emotion – I can’t even rely on the same emotion being created from the same thought in the future. It’s transitory, ephemeral … unless I choose to hang on to it, believe it, analyse it and keep on thinking it. In which case I can call it “A CORE BELIEF” and pay someone lots of money to help me “release” it.

Or of course, I could just recognise it for what it is, a thought that I keep thinking that seems to produce some kind of feeling, and not take it so seriously.

We think, therefore …

We have (depending on who you listen to) between 12,000 and 70,000 thoughts a day. Clearly, we’re not aware of most of them. If we’re not aware of them, they can’t affect us. They’re like clouds momentarily passing across the sky … they don’t stick, they don’t trigger emotions, we don’t remember them.

Some thoughts we DO remember and repeat; those that are associated with strong feelings for example. But we can’t predict which thought is going to result in a particular feeling, or indeed any feeling at all. I used to have a very strong emotional response to a thought associated with a particular memory, even years later. I used the NLP “Swish” technique a few times one evening and the emotion disappeared never to return, however many times I prodded at that memory.

If feelings and emotions are by-products of thought, just as shadows are by-products of light falling on objects, then they can’t “mean” anything, other than to signal what our thoughts are in the moment. And that means they don’t have to be feared, celebrated, avoided, changed or even – God help us!- “processed”. They will pass as our thoughts change. Yes, even the “positive” ones.

So if my thoughts about myself (and others) are so fleeting, who am I? Sometimes I feel I could conquer the world (or at least my cats – I’m clearly delusional in these moments), at others I’m an insecure, fearful wreck. I can be funny as hell or boring as fuck, depending on my thinking at the time. Does my essential self change from moment to moment, as various thoughts flit across my mind? Am I THAT ephemeral? IS there an “essential self” that’s clearly separate from everyone else’s “self” and that exists independently of my thoughts about it?

An Idea of Self?

I recognise SOME kind of “awareness” that has stayed with me my whole life, something that I recognise as Isobel, but where is that part of me held? It can’t be in my mind, because that changes so quickly. It can’t be in my body, that’s DEFINITELY changed over the years! It’s generally accepted that memories are accessed through the physical brain and ECT seems to demonstrate that at least some aspects of personality are too. But the self that I seem to be in touch with every day – does that actually exist at all, in any permanent sense? If my thoughts and resulting feelings about myself and others can change on a whim …

YOU ARE AN IDEA OF SELF suddenly doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

Alignment

For the last 15 plus years, I’ve lived according to the belief that I create my reality – or at least the part of it that I’m aware of – by aligning my vibration with the vibration of what I want. And the way I know if I’m in alignment, is by how I feel. If I feel good, I’m moving towards what I want; if I feel bad, I’m moving away from it. And if I feel bad, the way to change that is to change my thought to a better-feeling one. But that better-feeling thought is only going to last a short time, a few hours at most until the next powerful thought takes its place and the process has to start again. It’s impossible to monitor thought for long without driving ourselves nuts, so we monitor emotions to tell us where our thoughts are leading. At the same time, we don’t create through thoughts or words – we create through vibrational alignment.

But if thoughts are just random and arbitrary and pop up out of nowhere .. and if emotions equally arbitrarily follow those thoughts and point back to them … how do I identify my vibration? And how do I change it?

Are we getting closer? 😛

To be continued (again) …

Love, always
Isobel xx

Coming up: Effortless Change