Have you ever felt that you were a victim of your situation, or your thoughts?
Knowing how to improve your mood, your situation, and the entire world is a choice each of us makes every day.
Negativity, resentment, anger, and revenge, like all other bad habits, can be changed in the blink of an eye, within your own head. Deciding to follow a less familiar course of thoughts and actions is what holds most of us back, like a refusal to change as a badge of honor.
Some people think they have no choice, no choice to stop being negative, resentful, or angry. In fact, some people feel justified by choosing these emotions. After all, they just appear out of nowhere, right? Situations happen to make them feel this way, right?
Wrong.
This is like driving to the faraway place you have driven to a hundred times before, even if it is a bit complicated. You have the familiar path comfortably in your mind. You have your favorite chosen routes. You know them well.
I am chuckling to myself at my own inability to straighten out my directionally dyslexic mind/speech path. If my husband is driving and quickly asks if we should go right or left, unless I am taking that extra moment to consciously say the correct direction, I mostly say the opposite of what I mean. However, I always point my thumb in the correct direction, always.
I used to find this frustrating, since I do know right from left. But that thought always made me feel less-than. Why couldn’t I simply say the “right” thing all the time? Instead, I now choose to find this a bit comical. My husband chooses to find it endearing. He’s even told me there is no “wrong” direction, since the earth is round, that we will eventually get there.
To go in a different mental direction than the usual emotional route means going on fewer familiar roads, like choosing a new thought route instead of the old go-to self-sabotage route. Negativity has the lowest vibrational frequency but that is no reason to stay with the thinking that will sink your ship and keep you in a dark emotional place, including suicidal thoughts. Suicidal thoughts do not own you. You are the captain of yourself, not the lowest negative thoughts about yourself, your situation, including the situations on the world stage.
You can brighten everything you think, say, and do with the realization that you control your thoughts, feelings and emotions. They do not control you. This realization is one of the best ways to help yourself and others.
Concentrating on how bad you feel only makes these feelings get more obstinent. You are not invalidating yourself by attempting to make yourself feel better. I have heard so many people say, “But that is how I am feeling. I want to be true to myself.”
They think that by not choosing to stay with their dark and negative, or resentful, or angry thoughts, that they are not being honest with themselves. The truth is, they are not being honest, nor truthful, if they choose to stay in the darkest mental and emotional places possible. Yes, it might be true that this is the feeling with which they start out. But purposefully choosing to stay in that dark place is another matter.
Why would anyone refuse to feel better?
Some people like to wallow in what has brought them to the mental and emotional place they find themselves in, as a way of justification to remain in a bad mood, almost like a badge of their gloomy and self-sabotaging state. Without conscious focus and realization, they resign themselves to the fact that they are choosing their own misery, not the other way around.
Again, I ask, who does this intentionally?
This is a character development problem. Children wrestle with this dilemma until they come to understand that it is possible to have a better day, a better thinking system, solve more inter-personal problems, and find solutions to situations outside of themselves. In taking these self-help steps, children and adults alike come to discover that they do have a strong influence on what comes next in their lives.
Life does not stand still. Now is not forever. Things change. Situations change. People change, even themselves over time. Let us all take a moment in this distracting time in world history and in our own private lives, to begin to improve the situations we find within ourselves, our families, and in the world at large.
One vital thing to understand, is that even if you spend a lifetime uncovering and understanding why something is the way it is, it is more important on what you decide to do next. What saves the most life? What makes you most happy? Ask positive questions like these as opposed to haunting ghost memories that come from places of dysfunction, such as making decisions based on what you do not want. Think, speak, and act in the positive. This may take some time to re-wire your brain if negativity has been your habit.
As a graduate of the American Institute of Holistic Health and Wellness, taught by Dolores Seymour, Ph. D., and attending her seminars in New York City, New York, I came away with a greater understanding of the book she wrote, Who Cares Why?
Bosses and parents often try to get to the bottom of the present problem by finding out whose fault something was. Neither slapping wrists nor pointing fingers does not solve any problem. Pointing a finger at someone else results in you pointing three fingers back at yourself.
Understand it is more important to discover what to do next. Blaming and finding fault solves nothing. You can spin your wheels for hours, giving yourself a migraine headache and alienating everyone around you by staying stuck.
This is exactly what happens mentally with people whose go-to emotional state insists on staying negative, resentful, or angry. No one wants to be around people with these constant complaining traits. Know that it is possible to change. First, they need to know change is possible.
As Nelson Mandela was fond of saying, “Be the change you want to see.”
Namaste