Of all emotions, you could experience. What would be the one emotion that is the best of them all? If you could choose just one emotion and that was what you could ever feel for the rest of your life. What would that one emotion be? Happiness? Ecstasy? Joy? All of those emotions are great to feel. Yet there is one emotion, I believe trumps them all. In fact, when you feel this particular emotion you also get the benefits of all those other emotions you get the ecstasy and Joy with a heaping helping of elated. What emotion could possibly be that good? The answer is Love.
Wow! Dude your eyes are going to fall out of your head if you keep rolling them around that hard. All joking aside, yeah I am talking about the feeling of love. Feeling loved. Not that tingly feeling you get when you see a hot girl. That is lust, a completely different emotion. Love is a feeling all its own. Love is a purely positive feeling.
What is Love?
Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy, nor does it not boast. Love is not proud. You will never be dishonored by love because it is not self-seeking. Love is not easily angered. Real love easily forgives. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres.
You have heard most of that. Great description of what real love is. However, many people don’t apply the credit to where it belongs. The origin of that is from the bible.
I think it would be awesome to feel nothing but love all day long. Wouldn’t it be great to love everybody? You would be smiling and loving everybody you saw. You know how confused your trolls would be if they tried to throw a little hate your way, and only get love in return? They wouldn’t know what to do.
How would you feel if you heard your ex-wife and the man she was unfaithful with were getting married? What if you just loved them? What if you blessed their upcoming marriage? What recourse would they have? The cool thing is they can’t stop you from loving them both. What if you wished their marriage all the luck in the world? How do you think that would feel? How do you think they would feel if they heard and saw that type of love?
I can hear so many of you say, “Oh Hell no, I feel sorry for her fiancé. That poor excuse of a man is going to realize how much of a cheating lowlife she really is.” Yet that isn’t love. They have a defense for that type of attack. If you go to them and just love them for being humans there is no defense for that. They can’t stop you from feeling love nor more than they can stop you from feeling hate. The difference you get to experience the love. That incredible at peace and contentment sensation of love is yours to feel all day long.
How to Control Your Emotions
Now I am not saying we act like a bunch of Vulcans and run around with no emotions at all. First off that would be very boring. Second, we are emotional beings. Emotions are the colors of our memories. So without emotions, there are no good experiences. No good experiences then we don’t know what is good from the bad. Our experiences help us to define what is good and bad. We know what bad is because we know what is good.
Yet so many people believe that their emotions run free. They have no control over what and when they feel. Most people don’t want the responsibility of owning their own emotions. They don’t care to be response abled to what or who is the true owner of the feelings they experience. It is often easier to hand over that power to somebody else. Often that somebody else is a complete stranger. How many times have you ever said “they pissed me off” or something to the effect my in-laws make me so mad. You make me happy. Worse yet you say something like this to your spouse, “You don’t make me happy anymore.”
Talk about having your priorities out of line, to expect somebody other than you, to make you happy. How are they supposed to know when you are actually happy? That specific responsibility is a lot to put on somebody you supposedly love.
Stranger Danger
Then there are the random people out in the world. Yet, you want them to make you feel a certain way? I mean come on man that’s a tall order. These poor stiffs are struggling with the weight of their own world on their shoulders. So why not add another problem to it. Besides, do you trust that there are going to deranged people who might jump behind these delicate controls?
Another point to put on this is, from the internet we know of trolls. We know that these delightful people love to see if they make people miserable. Can they hurt random folk’s feelings? You know these trolls, we have faced these trolls many a time on Facebook and Twitter. Yet for some reason, you want to give strangers your emotional control box? You do realize that more than one of them could be a troll. How would this bonehead relish in the thought of all the pain and negative feelings they create in one person all because someone wants them to not make them mad?
Therefore, I ask, do you really want to hand your happiness over to a random stranger? Do you want to hand your girlfriend wife brother sister mom or dad that type of burden? They are struggling at making themselves happy and you can’t put your big boy britches on just for this? Why not take control of your emotions. Take control of the thing that only affects you.
You choose
Go ahead and choose what emotion you would like to feel. Here is the kicker, you have always had the ability to choose your own emotions. It is easier to not worry about what you are thinking. I understand that point. Oh, believe me, I have had my fair shares of handing over my control box to people I love or total strangers. You then become upset because they didn’t control it correctly. It isn’t fair to you nor is it fair to those people who you chucked your emotional controls at. So why not take your control box back, learn how to work the emotional levers, and switches yourself.
It’s all in your head
There is a big revelation coming up here quick. You are able to control your emotions. You have had that control box your whole life. You just weren’t taught how to use it. Growing up you were taught how to read write maybe some art and home economics with a dash of Consumer math. Did you ever go to Emotional knowledge or Feelings 101? No. You were never taught about your emotions. We got a brief overview of what emotions are but that was it. Because of that lack of education were have been taught that emotions just happen. That is where you are wrong. Your thoughts create your feelings.
The chain of events
Your thoughts are the creators of your emotions. The process works like this. You have an event. This event creates a thought in your mind. That thought generates an emotion. That emotion creates an action, with that action producing the result. That whole sequence is called, The Model, and was created by Brooke Castillo. The Model is a self-Coaching strategy that helps understand your thoughts.
Your thoughts are the key to the whole barbeque. Uncontrolled thoughts are why we give up our emotional responsibility so easily. We let our thoughts run free. We let our mind just think whatever it wants to think and it is running roughshod over your life. It takes just your experiences and applies what it believes is good or bad to an event and then you get to experience that emotion. So you want to start paying attention to what you are thinking.
Change your thoughts and you change your emotions. This works for all the different emotions you experience.
Are you suffering from anxiety? Your anxiety is from you just letting your mind think whatever it wants to. If you don’t “Suffer” from anxiety, and you ask a person who has anxiety what they are thinking, you are likely going to get a whole range of thoughts. Why are my ears ringing? What if people don’t accept me? Where do I put my feet? What are people going to think of me? All of the thoughts that are produced are created because that person just lets their mind run free. Instead, ask, the important question of “What is the worst that can happen?” “Will I die if I am not accepted?” “What if my fear doesn’t happen?” Anxiety is an uncontrolled mind. You change your thoughts you can change your anxiety-riddled life.
Often if I tell someone that, the secret many times they will oppose the notion by saying “You don’t know what I’m going through” And yeah technically they are correct but that rebuttal is their mind fighting back against the notion that they can be free from that anxiety. It takes getting out into your zone of discomfort. It is easier to just stay in the familiar mire than go and feel exposed on the dry land
Emotions are a solo experience
Since your thoughts are all in your head, which means that only you can experience your emotions. If you feel happy, your spouse can’t experience that happiness. That is why each of you can have such opposing experiences of the same event. Your thoughts create your emotions. This also means that you can’t experience your partner’s emotions either.
Now you may be saying no I have seen my wife mad and she is good at making sure I experience those emotions with her. To that, I will say no you are thinking of her behavior which creates emotion. You can change your thought on this and have a completely different experience.
Now, this doesn’t mean you don’t have to worry about other people’s feelings. Just because you know the secret to your feeling, love all the time. That doesn’t mean everybody else knows the secret. Therefore, your actions and behaviors will generate thoughts in others. So as Uncle Ben said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” So, when people hand their emotional responsibility over to you Hand it back. Then just love them. They don’t have the same emotional maturity or understanding. So treat them as you would want to be treated.
Pay attention to your thoughts
Controlling your thoughts isn’t always easy. Your mind loves to be as efficient as possible so when you aren’t paying attention it will go on autopilot. That is where different events will crop up and you will suddenly be angry because of something, or anxious because somebody laughed at the wrong time. An uncontrolled mind is a lot like a toddler with a scalpel cute as can be but very dangerous. Therefore, you want to start learning how to control your thoughts.
One way to learn to pay attention to your thoughts is to practice mindfulness. This helps you understand and pay attention to what your mind is doing, has it strayed or is it focusing on the task at hand? With mindfulness, it becomes easier to know when your mind is just free-roaming. Then if it is free-roaming, you can gently direct it back to where you want it to be.
You are also able to change your thoughts. Instead of getting mad, because someone waits till the last second to merge into your lane. Instead of thinking, this idiot wants to get in front of everybody else. Which then brings on the emotion of anger, irritation or spite.
You can change your thought to anything else. He wasn’t paying attention. They are lost and looking for landmarks. He needs to get home as soon as possible. That dude really is in a bigger hurry than you. See there are thousands of other thoughts you could be having. Now if you wanted to feel only love then you may think here you go, be safe. May you get to where ever you are going safe and sound. Then if you have that emotion in your heart all the time, your commute is almost pleasant.
Now you are going to fall off the bicycle.
I still find my mind doing its own thing from time to time. For instance, recently I needed some work done to the truck I drive for my day job. My boss told me that he was busy and needed me to come in and do the work. I get there with the irritated thoughts of I have other things to do. Then I get there and I find that he isn’t there at all. So I get into an even fowler mood and commence to getting toy work not talking to anybody. Not enjoying the company that I could be a part of. I am just miffed that I have to do a task that would actually be helping my boss out. Instead, I stew in the emotional unpleasantness until my boss does show up.
Now in hindsight, there is so much freethinking I was doing there. None of the freethinking was heling me. I was applying more energy to why the boss wasn’t there. I was ticked because I didn’t know what in the world I was doing. I could have had the thought that I was going to learn something useful. Yet that wasn’t the case, I had let my thoughts go free and I was a jerk.
So there are times you are going to forget to control your thoughts and if that happens. It happens to take that instance of failure and learn from it. You will get better each time a challenge comes around. Will you get better? Well, that depends on the challenge.
It’s all thought control!
Well yeah, it is. Not by the government or anything like that. It is in your hands. So now that you know you can feel anything you want. What do you want to feel? Love? Then change your thoughts to loving thoughts. If you have anger management problems then congrats you can turn your world around rather quickly. It will still take the effort of you paying attention and learning how to control your thoughts but you can do it. Anxiety is the same thing, don’t worry about what other people think. That is because you would be surprised to find out how little people actually think of you. It is a lot less than you want them to.
You can feel happiness and love if you chose to. It isn’t easy but it is pleasurable. You quickly notice when you are not feeling awesome a super-duper as you want. So you can start making the shifts in your thoughts so that you are able to experience the emotions you want to experience. You can accept the negative emotions you have and make the needed changes to have the emotions that are amazing, and positive.
If you want to start changing your thoughts, you can get my eBook by filling the form out below, and good luck on your new journey.
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