Negative Emotions - Hidden Meaning of your feelings and Guidance

So, I felt crappy today. What does this really mean? Does it mean that my life is somehow out of whack and I have to change everything around me until it feels better? Does it mean that somehow, I have screwed up and made the wrong decisions? Does it mean that my doubts were justified and it really came as bad as I had anticipated it?

Maybe. Some or all of it might actually be true. There are things and events in my life I could live without and if they weren’t, I’d certainly feel better. I could try to change everything around me and for a while, that really might do the trick. Some decisions in my life might not have been the wisest ones and now I live the consequences. I had some doubts and they manifested nicely into the according life circumstances.

But I can also look at it from a different perspective, and this one is even more helpful: my emotions simply tell me that I am not in harmony with my deeper knowledge, that I have lost, in this moment, with this thought, the contact with what I know, deep inside. There is a part of me which knows what I want, which knows where I want to go and even how I get there fastest and easiest. But it’s voice is subtle, it is easily overheard, especially in our societies with all their rules and regulations.

This subtle, small voice of our Inner Knowledge is not really a “voice”, it is more a feeling, it’s the feeling of passion, excitement, joy and confidence. These feelings are like guideposts, and normally they should propel us forward, they should make us move and nudge us in the right direction.

But since those around us told us from childhood on that joy and enthusiasm are highly overrated and cannot be trusted – which is a lie – and that we should instead rather do our job properly and push forward in the direction that pleases them more and that it brings bad luck to get excited too early, we unlearned quite early to listen to this Inner voice, to trust this feeling of elation when it flows through us.

The part of us that is connected to All-That-Is, the Higher Self, if we want to call it this way (terminology is not really all that important), has over our lifetime collected all kinds of wishes, wants, desires and goals. It is brimming with the good stuff and it is viewing our life from the elevated perspective of our Divine Self, it knows how we can reach our goals most efficiently, it knows which way is good for us and it tries to guide us towards everything we ever asked for.

But what are we doing? We bicker and fret, we complain about what is and that it is so not at all like what we would want to have, we get all hung up on the unpleasant details of our existence and we totally loose the contact to this bright and fluffy part of ourselves.

Our Higher Self has no stern view on life, it is not reprimanding us for not doing the right thing, it is always staying focused on what we really want and keeps a steady gaze on that, and we can always say how much we are in touch with it by paying attention to how we feel.

If we feel great, we are in line with it, if we feel crappy, we have deviated from it quite a bit and this emotion is there to let us know that we are heading in the wrong direction with our thoughts.

This is a great system, and it could be extremely powerful, if we hadn’t been indoctrinated most of our life to mis-interpret our emotions, to believe the nagging voice of doubt, to validate fear and frustration, to let our anger justify our behaviour. All that does, is speeding up our march in the wrong direction, leading us farther and farther away from what we want, and therefore, in a very screwy way, validating our negative emotion in a kind of vicious cycle.

We feel the negative emotion, listen to it, things go wrong and we tell ourselves: “I knew all along it would go wrong, I had such a bad feeling about it.”

While all the way, the bad feeling about it should have been a warning sign that the thought we were thinking in this moment would not lead us to any result that we could enjoy when we’d reach it. So, at any point along the way, we would have been able to just turn the whole thing around by changing the direction of our thoughts and starting to listen to our emotions.

Thoughts that bring us nearer to what we want feel wonderful, or at least better as the one’s which lead us away from what we want. When we are in a situation in which we already have quite some negative momentum going (we have thought about it, talked with others about it, maybe even written about it), it is not possible to all of a sudden find a fluffy, bright and shiny thought about exactly this topic.

The range of available thoughts always goes from a little bit better to a little bit worse, but not from “oh my God, where will this all end” to “yeah, this is the best thing that ever happened to me!”.

We have to pay attention to how we feel, how our thoughts make us feel and then to carefully chose thoughts that feel better to us, since these are the thoughts that are in harmony with what we know, deep inside.

Our true nature is part of this great cosmic intelligence, and we all can connect to it by using the guidance our emotions provide. We just have to decide that who we really want to be is someone who is in harmony with himself, someone tuned in to his true nature, someone who is centred and balanced and therefore extremely powerful.

I have never, in my whole life, seen anyone who was depressed or fearful and at the same time powerful and charismatic. When we fall prey to our negative emotions, we lose our power supply, we lose our connection and therefore our orientation and clarity. Clarity and depression are opposites. Charisma and timidity are like fire and water. Panic makes blind, not clear-minded.

Whenever we feel negative emotions eating away on our joy, we have to stop and ask ourselves, what does that really mean? How could I see this situation different, in a way that would feel better? What do I really want? What does this feeling really tell me?

And I’m sure, it never tells us that our goal is wrong, it always only tells us that this thought that we think in this moment, is not leading us in the right direction. It’s like my navigational system, highlighting only the roads that lead me to my chosen destination, constantly calling me to return to the highlighted road.

The highlighted road feels good and it can lead to absolutely every destination we desire, and we can get there from wherever we are. All we have to do is pay attention to our thoughts and how they feel and to chose them according to how good they feel.

Isn’t that really wonderful to know?

© Dorothee Geray 2010

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