“I know better. I know I’m a good person. I know I deserve an amazing life and an incredible partner. I just have to constantly keep reminding myself of that…when do I actually start believing it?”
Her words were echoed again and again, and again by others around the circle, in perhaps different words, but same meanings.
Ugh, the struggle.
All too often we work to bring our emotional and mental bodies together. We want to feel what our mind thinks, and all too often these two do not want to play in the sandbox together.
Our feeling body and our analytical mind are two separate functions as is clear by their simple description; feeling and analytical. One is the mind, one is the body.
First of all, I think we need to ask the question, where is our mind?
We know where we feel. We feel inside our body; emotions, senses, vibes, pain, joy, hunches and so much more.
But, our mind doesn’t feel, it thinks; wonders, holds belief systems, figures things out, pays attention, builds consciousness, makes the grocery list, etc.
Our mind essentially seems to exist for some in their head, but no, it’s not there. Our brain is not our mind. They have totally different jobs.
Seemingly, the thoughts and the feelings are totally different and unrelated.
But are they? How do we create a copesetic relationship between the two?
We can indeed practice feeling differently about our thoughts, and in essence, realize the mind and the feelings are occupying the same space – our body.
In the function of the mind, we have a thought and that thought triggers a series of internal responses that land in the world of what we feel in our body. Our emotions tend to come as a finale in that there is an outside, or inside trigger that spurs our META programs (internal operating systems including internal files, simply put) into action and our emotional body is the receiver of the chemistry that ultimately creates the emotion.
Our mind is a consciousness that exists within our body. Think for a moment; when you have a memory of a super fun time in your younger days, where does that memory live, or come from?
Hint: It’s in your body.
Whew! That’s kind of a lot.
We can’t control all of the triggers the world provides. What we can begin to practice is how to feel differently about our thoughts.
We have a tendency to believe our feelings are some ultimate truth that can’t be argued with. This is not true.
Our feelings are simply a conditioned or repeatedly practiced response, and if you can learn one thing, you can learn anything.
So, just as the women earlier in the story were dealing with feeling responses that had been taught to them years and years and years in the making, those feelings are not the only feelings available to them. If they can feel the yearning to “feel” their worth, then indeed they can. Just as they have been taught to doubt their value, they can teach themselves to feel their true worth and love how it feels inside of them.
When we repeat the new process over and over again, it begins to take the place of the formerly assumed truth, and we change how we feel, it will actually then shift our thinking. So then, what we think of ourselves begins to match with how we feel about ourselves in a positive way.
While our perception is that our thoughts and our feelings don’t tend to work together, we are able, with our consciousness intact, to shift how we feel to align fully with the worthiness and deserving we know is ours to hold as truth.
Take a feeling, bring in a thought of how you desire to feel instead, and practice experiencing those feelings in your body while you are thinking the correlating thoughts.
If you can learn to feel negatively about yourself, you can indeed learn to feel positively about yourself!
Now, how does that feel?
Forever the journey,
Anne