Moods

My every emotion, feeling, or mood follows on directly from my thinking.  My thinking is not always accurate or actually even important and it does not always indicate what’s best for me.

In reality, my feelings are nothing more than feedback about my thinking.

My famous team of nuns from primary school always taught me to let emotion be my guide.  I believe this is very good advice and I have always followed my own feelings, gut feelings rather than listen to someone telling me what to do.      

Several times I have misread my feelings and it has got me into trouble, once when I was 17, working at Our Price I got a slap round the face when I asked someone out after misreading my own feelings and also misreading signals. 

I always feel what I think, that doesn't mean though that I am always feeling the truth - I that makes sense, it does in my head but not necessarily now I have written it down. 

Feelings from thinking do not stretch to mental health, life, job or even about you being with the right or wrong partner.  This I have learnt over time through making some silly mistakes.  I used to think they were. When something in my environment seemingly aroused negative emotion in me, I’d jump straight into action. Life became a game of adding in the “right stuff” and subtracting out the “wrong stuff” in order to feel as good as possible.

I thought this was very enlightened; after all, I was no longer willing to put up with what didn’t feel good and I was consciously choosing more of what did. 

Thinking isn’t dictated by anything. It just arises, with emotion tagging along, and I hold on to it and tell stories about it.  Thoughts are transitory, impersonal and always in motion just like feelings.  

The word emotion means in motion, as in always moving.  For example, from the time I woke up this morning to 19:38pm, I have had a few thousand thoughts and feelings that I have paid no attention to, so they have floated away in motion and were replaced by new thoughts and feelings.  

My mind drifts a lot... My thoughts and feelings change all day every day with absolutely no effort or fanfare.  From random thoughts about the weather to thoughts about my wife, these thoughts I hold on to and they spin round and round and round in my mind.  Not everything drifts away.  Some thoughts I mark as important and I give them meaning or they have meaning to me.  I imbue them with emotion and attention which is my mental superglue.  

I believe my thoughts are like breath, when I stop holding my breath, new breath rushes in. When I stop holding my thoughts, new ones rush in, bringing new feelings in tow.

All I ever have “to do” is nothing. The only position I ever have to take is of non-interference.

Bad feelings I struggle with, even though I intellectually understand that bad feelings aren’t meaningful or harmful to me, and even though I know that feelings are always in motion, bad feelings make me feel down.  

I know that my experience of life is entirely thought created and I am not what I think I am, my attachment to feelings both good and bad shift all the time.  It took me a long time to remember that when I do not hold onto thoughts and emotions, I allow new thought and emotions to rush in.  

Emotions are naturally in motion. There is an awareness and distance that prevents me from being taken down by them.  This is possible for anyone to achieve.