Don’t believe everything you think. How the Stories You Tell Yourself Define Your Life.
If you are someone who generally blames themselves, for all their upsets, misdemeanours and mishaps you’re likely to beat yourself up (metaphorically speaking) and feel sad or anxious (“What have I done to upset her”?). Or maybe you are someone who is more inclined to point the finger and place the blame on other people, you will generally get angry (“What’s her problem!”).
Stories
So, your life is not so much dependent on what you believe you are going through, it’s more how you feel and experience what happens to you, based on the stories you are telling youself.
Your are not your stories
You are not your thoughts.
Most of your thoughts are repetitive ones, and they say more about your conditioning and past than about you or your current reality. We view life through our own personal lens with all its filters in place to make sense of things in life — your “usual stories”. And you believe them, they conform and confirm notably because your emotions and reality seem to prove them right.
So, your thoughts, emotions and actions influence and reinforce each other. They can form a positive or negative cycle. If you think that you suck at your job, guess what? You will. Why? Because by believing so, you will focus on what is going wrong, and will therefore experience “negative emotions” that will inevitably hamper your performance, which will then reinforce your initial belief. Your distorted perception of reality creates a reality that conforms to your perception.
When you think differently, you to feel and act differently. Think about when you try on clothes, just trying the same dress on in black then in white will have an impact on how you think and see yourself.
But if you let outside events impact your thoughts, and hence your emotions, you are like a rudderless boat drifting on the open sea with the wind and currents deciding your course. You are the only one in control of your thoughts, you are the only one who can give yourself permission how you choose to RE-ACT or RESPOND consciously.
You don’t have to fight your thoughts and emotions? — for what you resist, persists.
The hidden gifts of emotions
Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness.
-Eckhart Tolle
Your emotions are like passing clouds in the sky. Some are sunny days and others are overcast. The truth is that emotions are neither good nor bad in themselves, as Eckhart Tolle says. Emotions are your god-sent messengers: they are symptoms that are meant to keep you healthy by informing you of some disease.
And most importantly, emotions are your change agents.
Emotion into movement without emotion.is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy
— Carl G. Jung.
So why is this all so important?
Simply because your life is the result of your decisions — whether they are made consciously or unconsciously. Even the act of not making a decision is a decision.
The decisions you make shape the path of who you become
You cannot determine life’s events; ( we don’t have a Chrystal ball) – they are a given – but you are not defined by them either. Why do two people see a cloudy rainy Monday morning so differently? One person sees it as the start of a miserable week. The other sees it as the most beautiful day as she runs into the garden and looks up at the clouds and lets the rain run down her face as she has just received the news that her cancer is in remission. Same day different outlook.
In conclusion, the proof is that people shape their outlook of themselves very differently and their destinies. This was done through the decisions they made. And, becoming more conscious and self-aware empowers you with the ability to choose your response to any given set of circumstances. You choose how you want to live your life not the other way round, in other words you are not a puppet on a string with a master pulling and deciding what you do.
The only way your future can be different from your past. For as Carl Jung reminds us:
I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.
— Carl Jung
Stay safe
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