si dawson

Here's an old, but use­ful exercise:

Pay atten­tion to your thoughts. What are you think­ing right now?

Ok. Good.

Here's another one:

What are you feel­ing right now? What is your pri­mary emotion?

Ok, excel­lent. Bear with me.

If you lost your lit­tle fin­ger in an acci­dent, would you still be you? Or, put another way, since every cell in your body replaces itself every 7–10 years, or sooner, at any point do you stop being you?

See, it breaks down like this. If you can be aware of your thoughts, then you are not your thoughts. We have thoughts, but we are not our thoughts.
With emo­tions, it's even more obvi­ous. Unfor­tu­nately in Eng­lish we say things like "I am angry." In French or Ger­man things are more instruc­tive. They say "I have anger." We have emo­tions, but we are not our emo­tions.
We are obvi­ously not our phys­i­cal body either. We have a body, but there's some­thing more going on.

If you've read a lit­tle bit, I'm sure none of this is a sur­prise. Eck­hart Tolle talks about these real­i­sa­tions as part of his enlight­en­ment expe­ri­ence. Oh, & if you get the chance to see him live, I thor­oughly rec­om­mend it, he's a superbly enter­tain­ing speaker.

Of course, this is the point where I could totally under­stand you say­ing "Well, ok, so what?" & fair enough too.

This is one of those under­stand­ings that it's easy to have intel­lec­tu­ally, but might take years before it's really cemented into your being. Really know­ing some­thing in your heart can be funny like that.

If we're not our thoughts, emo­tions or bod­ies, then what are we? Well, that's another good ques­tion. I don't have any easy answers to that, except to say that we're what's left when thoughts & emo­tions are taken away. We're the space in which they form.

I'm not gen­er­ally a huge fan of philo­soph­i­cal pos­tur­ing. You can sit around & talk non­sense for years, but how does it help unless you actu­ally apply it, or do some­thing, or change something?

So, here's some­thing use­ful you can do with this information.

If you're not your thoughts, or your emo­tions, then when you sense these things aris­ing, you can let them go, just as eas­ily as they arose.

If you start think­ing some­thing that takes you out of your place of joy (or just gen­er­ally makes you feel bad), then realise they're just thoughts, spon­ta­neously aris­ing. You don't have to keep think­ing them. You don't have to stay focussed on that sub­ject. Just let it go. Drop it, or if that doesn't work, dis­tract your­self with some­thing you enjoy more. Why not? I mean, who's the boss — you, or your thoughts?

Same thing with emo­tions. Feel a neg­a­tive emo­tion, you don't have to keep feel­ing that. You'll only keep feel­ing it for as long as you choose to. I realise this is a lit­tle inflam­ma­tory, we're more or less raised to believe that emo­tions are these pow­er­ful things that we either feel intensely, or com­pletely deny (There's that "I am angry" or "I am not angry" thing again).

Bot­tom line though, who's the boss of you? Are your emo­tions the boss of you? Well, no, they're not. You can see this when you see two peo­ple expe­ri­ence the same event, and react com­pletely dif­fer­ently. Or by watch­ing how much peo­ple vary in terms of calm­ing down after an upset­ting event.

Emo­tions do tend to be a lit­tle more over­whelm­ing at times. There are many ways to gain con­trol back though. EFT is a good one — that'll allow you to drop any neg­a­tive emo­tional reac­tion alto­gether. Med­i­ta­tion, Yoga & exer­cise are help­ful too. Any­thing that helps you main­tain your cen­tre, your sense of self — rather than being swept away with events around you.

Once you realise that thoughts & emo­tions are not you, just things hap­pen­ing to you, you're tak­ing a huge, pos­i­tive step towards free­dom. The more you let go of them as they occur, the less power they have over you, & the more they start to dis­ap­pear. The more they dis­ap­pear, the calmer your life becomes, & the more you become, well, you. That sparkling ball of light, love & energy right at the core of your being. The part of you that peo­ple fall in love with. The part of you that your friends (the good ones, not the bitchy ones) adore so much.

Well, that's a pretty tall order, so where to start? Just start by pay­ing a lit­tle atten­tion. Notice when thoughts or emo­tions are run­ning away from you. Give your­self a chance to step back a lit­tle, let them go. Even just doing that tiny lit­tle thing will start to pay div­i­dends imme­di­ately. After all, what do you have to lose? The real You, not the thinking/emoting/farting you?