Week 5 – Wallowing is Overrated

I went to a meeting last Monday.  It was a business meeting of members of a team I created and then took a leave of absence from when I hit hard times I didn’t know how to pull out of.  I have avoided these meetings because the meetings, the discussions, and the people filled me with a lot of difficult feelings like guilt, embarrassment, fear, failure, shame, and the list keeps going.  For a year, I had been constantly rehearsing these feelings, talking about them, thinking about them, obsessing about them, and in the process, deeply entrenching them.  This meeting, the first one I had been to in a LONG time, made all those feelings come right back.

My stomach was in knots by the time I left, and the team leader spent one on one time with me talking to me, and everyone was warm, welcoming, and supportive.  Nobody had given me any reason to feel those things but ME!  I realized when I got to my car and could FEEL the tension and all those bad feelings coming back that I was CHOOSING to feel those feelings, and I could also choose to change it.  The Law of Dual Thought…

LAW OF DUAL THOUGHT

Thought is a combination of ideation and feeling. We can attach any feeling to a thought we want.

Suddenly, I realized something we have been talking about in this course.  I realized that I could choose to keep feeling all those awful feelings because my body had become addicted to them, or I could choose to attach different feelings to the experience.

I could choose to feel brave for taking a chance on doing something totally new that could net some much bigger returns in my life than what I had been getting in my previous line of work.  I could choose to feel proud that I worked so hard to get the business off the ground.  I could choose to feel capable that I had done very well
speaking in front of groups, connecting with people, listening, and sharing things that could really help people.  I could choose to feel daring for continuing to work on ways I can live the life I truly want instead of going back to the “safe” job I’d had before that was no longer challenging me to reach my potential.  I could choose to feel grateful that the whole experience is leading me to a much more enlightened state through doing MKMMA.  I could choose to feel exhilarated that I am in a process of learning and growing again.  I could feel confident that all of what I have been through is setting me up for something much bigger than I could have imagined.

Time to dump the old caveman ways of letting my thoughts and feelings control me!

I could choose to attach ANY and ALL of those feelings to the experience, to the meetings, to the people, instead of all those negative feelings.  And, that is exactly what I chose to do, and it felt amazing.  What incredible power comes from realizing that you don’t HAVE to feel badly.  You can CHOOSE to acknowledge your feelings and then decide if they are feelings you should honor, or feelings you should change because they are not serving you well.  Absolutely incredible.