What emotions guide you the most? Where do you spend most of your time, in emotions of love and joy or emotions of frustration and negativity? What feels familiar and what doesn’t?
I remember having a conversation with a good friend of mine after she retired from working 70 hours a week in corporate America. Her daughter had just had her first grandchild and her reaction was simple. Her words stay with me, “this is the first time I can honestly say I have felt true bliss.” She realized that all that hustle and bustle to raise kids while both parents worked high powered corporate jobs meant that there was very little time to feel some of those emotions. Very often it was less feeling and more doing. Very often the feeling constituted emotions like anger, frustration, denial, as she dealt with issues and problems at work or there was little true emotion, those were stuffed down with whatever vice there was, too much doing versus being. When we are busy, there is no time to feel. When we have feelings and they are familiar to us, we allow them, we don’t look at them with curiosity and say “how can I feel differently?” And too often we are guided by those familiar and negative feelings more than anything else.
Over the past decade plus, I have focused on leading with my heart and allowing my heart to open more and more. It was pummeled by my ex-husband and all the feeling was knocked out of me. My corporate job allowed me to go through my years just being very busy and working hard at not feeling. I faked being happy, and had little specks of joy in my life which I figured was good enough. I mean how many people are actually happy and filled with joy all of the time? I didn’t know anyone. I figured this was life, a few minutes of real happiness a day and a lot of doing “stuff” to get ahead, to do what I thought I should do.
As I have focused more on my heart, I realized how much I wasn’t aligned with what I wanted in my life. I allowed my core beliefs, which were not empowering at all, to be the underpinning of my actions and reactions. I allowed me to be a victim of circumstance or the aggressor of my agenda. I remember when my ex-husband and I were looking at houses. He wanted to move to North Jersey as it would be easier for him with his kids. The control freak in me wanted to live where I was happiest and closest to my family and my support system, and I didn’t let it happen. I am certain that was a “strike” against me in his mind and since he was a terrible communicator, it didn’t come out until years later. Talk about harboring a grudge, he was good at that. And talk about me needing it my way, without any compassion toward what he wanted. Control was a big issue for me then, needing to control the outcome of things, needing to have things the way I wanted them. I believed that I needed to control stuff in order to get what I wanted in life, quite the narrow view.
I spent so much of my life believing that the only way to get what I wanted was to control everything. I spent a lot of my life living in the emotions of lack, fear, anger, denial, sadness, shame and grief. I always believed I would not be loved if I wasn’t perfect and I needed to control things because others would let me down. Many of my beliefs were about me needing to be a certain way and do certain things in order to be loved, by friends and family.
My healing and the work I have done on me has allowed me to realize I need a new belief system. As I have worked to create new more empowering beliefs in my life I have found that I no longer am guided by having to do everything myself, or having to control. I also have worked to not react the way I once did and to judge less so I no longer live in the emotions of anger, denial, etc as much.
I have created new guides; gratitude, compassion and love. My focus now is to live from this place as much as possible spending far less time in those lower vibrating emotions that are draining. When I do react, I now stop and question myself, not in a judgmental way but with a sense of curiosity. I am now learning to move through this life with a sense of wonder and appreciation. I have always had a great capacity for compassion, more for others than myself. I would beat me up instead of alleviating my suffering. I would be the victim, even of my own judgments; especially of my own judgments. Having compassion for me has been life-altering. It has allowed me to really like who I am, no matter what anyone else thinks. It has also allowed me to become more aligned with the vision I have of me. Gratitude and love round out this new guidance system and have helped me create some new beliefs to be the underpinning of how I show up in the world.
These guiding emotions are now becoming embedded in how I think about myself and my life. Am I where I want to be yet? No. Am I getting there? Hell yes!
Every day I am closer to who I want to be and how I want to show up in the world; from a place of gratitude, compassion and love. What feelings do you let guide you?