YOU ARE NOT YOUR FEELINGS BY LORNA PATEN Who you are is perfect LOVE - pure, simple, boundless, limitless, joyous, expansive, creative, powerful ... LOVE. Yet, what you often feel is anything but that ... AND yet, you are the one who chooses to feel the way you feel. Jill Bolte-Taylor made the observation that emotion (energy-in-motion) takes 90 seconds to complete it’s journey though you and be done. If any feelings lasts longer than 90 seconds ... you must be doing something to make them stay ... you start to feel something, then you agree with whatever meaning you make out of the feeling then you feel it even more and on it goes ... sometimes for a lifetime!
Now you may not like this or understand it ... in fact I can hear the silver-tongued fearful ego voice in your head saying ... ”this is nuts, I don’t choose all my feelings, sometimes other people just make me feel stuff”. No they don’t. No one can make you choose anything you do not choose. You always have a choice even when you feel you do not. The truth about “I didn’t have a choice” is actually: “I did not like any of the other options so I chose the least painful/awful of what was available to me at the time”. So, who taught you how to feel your feelings? Where did you learn how to respond to what you are feeling rather than react? My guess is ... no one did. In fact, you have probably had little or no education or training in what feelings are, what they mean and how to use them as a resource for change rather than as a reason to stay wounded and suffering. Consider this: How much of your life have you spent feeling that you are not good enough not worth enough, or deserving enough or pretty enough or smart enough or successful enough or strong enough or brave enough or lucky enough or quick enough or calm enough or ... just not enough?
www.michellebowden.com.au
How to Present Magazine
JULY 2013
18