Dear Radiant Readers,
As the beautiful words of a profoundly spiritual scientist Albert Einstein say below, everything is Energy. You are energy, your world and life are energy, everything you touch, see and feel is energy. Why is that important? Because Focused energy, or Consciousness, has a power to change energy around. Therefore, you have a power to change you and your world, when you focus your Awareness.
We all get a little ( or a lot:P) unhappy with certain elements in our lives and with ourselves also. Depending on who you are in terms of your awareness of self, there would be different ways in which you can make yourself happier.
I would like to talk about something that can apply to you no matter where you are from, how you live, what your habits are, whether you think you are a spiritual person or a “materialist”; what I would like to suggest is something that seems to benefit just about anybody.
I am talking about Awareness. Being Aware is different from thinking, one doesn’t have to Think in order to be Conscious. We can perceive a lot around us and not think about it. So, how do we get more awareness and how does it help us?
Let’s look at it from our everyday point of view: for instance, we are in a bad mood, in fact we woke up this way! No actual logical reason comes to mind as to why we are feeling this way, we just are!
Generally, we have several main ways of dealing with unpleasant emotions:
(1) Ignore and distract.
(2) Vent it, engage in it, fully express it.
(3) Analyse it by yourself or with a therapist (counsellor, psychiatrist, etc.)
(4) Seek a philosophical or spiritual approach to it.
(1) Consciously or not, we may choose not to delve too deeply into it or think about it, as sometimes there is just no time or desire to feel even worse! So we try to get ourselves to feel better by doing something else, such as watching a funny programme on TV, having a cigarette, a sweet chocolate bar, anything really that triggers the endorphins or happy memories from before! And you know, most of the time it works! We forget about the feeling of unhappiness, carry on and smile with a brave face! Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that If, gentle reader, you are happy with this?
(2) We all know how this goes: we snap at colleagues or family at home, everything annoys us, the traffic, the bus, the people at work… everyone and anything can get to us.
(3) Analysing why we feel have certain emotions, does help, and it does bring more awareness into the “issues” or reasons behind them. However, I am not inviting you in this article to go digging into every one of your issues! Especially not, if knowing why you are upset today, doesn’t bring you closer to not being upset today! :D I.e. You figured it all out: your mother always told you that you were lazy and disorganised, which triggered an angry emotion in you during some incident yesterday, which is why you are annoyed this morning! So, you know why, yet it doesn’t give you peace….We’ve been doing that for the last 50 years with psychiatry, and yes, sometimes it works, however, it’s hit and miss and largely depends on your therapist & not always so much on you. As when you encounter professionals that “don’t click it with you”, or their “methods” are not quite for you, it just won’t work. Besides, we’ve got SO many unresolved traumatic issues… if we lived with them for 10, 20, 40 years, would we want to spend the next 10 or 20 years resolving all this? If not, then I suggest you try something else.
(4) The simplest way to begin to change how you feel for good, is to take control over how you feel. And it is certainly not by numbing your emotions, not entirely by digging and analysing either. Not by suppressing or forcing. Not by ignoring. Certainly Not by taking drugs that do the numbing and suppressing for you, so you don’t even have a chance to suppress them yourself!:) There is really no power for you in that. So, if not drugs and not everything else we mentioned, then what else is left there?? You can begin by finding something in you that is beyond all this drama and upsets. And no, it’s not a religion, it’s not even a spiritual following, it’s not “new age” stuff, it doesn’t even have to be a meditation… All you have to do is to simply be aware of what you feel. That is all. Well, almost :) Be aware without judgement, and have the awareness of the emotion in you, as in – notice that the emotion is… separate from You! It is trying to get you to be more upset, or express certain actions because you feel a certain emotion…However, is it really You? Or is it just the emotion in you? Watch it, and notice that it’s not you, who’s upset or angry or sad, you simply let sadness, anger or upset into you. And now you are aware of them in you. You do not have to Engage into those emotions anymore. If you don’t want to! :) You have a choice now! You are not a victim of you being sad, you have the Power of awareness that you have an emotion in you, and hence You are not that Emotion, hence You don’t have to behave in the way that emotion behaves. Because it is not you, you have a choice to not engage into that particular emotion (frequency). :) You now have more Freedom.
Just be aware. Without judging how you feel.
Simply acknowledge and observe the emotion in or around you.
This allows to become aware
that the emotion is in you, but is not you.
You are simply aware or observing this emotion.
How do we do this without thinking? And won’t we get more upset if we focus on the sad emotions we have? No, if we acknowledge the emotions we have, as opposed to identify with them by saying that “I am”! As in, “I am annoyed”, or “I am angry”, we could notice the anger in us, and instead say to ourselves: “I have anger”, “I sense annoyance”. So, a good exercise would be to simply notice what emotions and feelings you have right now as you are reading this. Do you feel: tired, alert, happy, dissatisfied, joyous, upset, impatient? Whatever you feel, just have an awareness of what it is you are feeling. Whatever it is you sense right now about you inside, feel that emotion, sense it and “observe it internally” so to speak. Now notice that you are not One with the Emotion, otherwise, how would you look or observe something that is you? You are aware of the emotion IN you. So, here is You, and somewhere inside you or (sometimes) around you is this emotion you are sensing! If you acknowledge it and say to yourself: “I have this emotion”. You can then decide what to do with it or simply do nothing, but realise that you are free to choose any other emotion now, as this is NOT you, but simply a particular frequency of sadness, worry, upset, etc. in you. This alone bring more awareness into you. With this conscious awareness you can Choose, therefore you have more Power over how you feel and what frequencies or emotions you choose to “entertain”. This works better than feeling whatever it is that happens to “possess you” at any given time! When we repress these emotions or ignore them, we still haven’t acknowledged that they are there! And we allow them to continue to take some control over parts of us, because we have no true awareness of them. With Awareness comes Consciousness, and Consciousness is Power.
So, because what I am describing above is basically focus, you focus on what you sense within you. Awareness or Consciousness is Focused Energy. And only through intentional focus, you can more consciously expand your awareness and do it Much Faster, than if you leave it all to Life, environment or fate. There will come a time, when you will be forced to focus on you inside, as eventually, this lesson comes to all. All we need to do then is simply be aware of us. Become aware of as much as possible! And with this Focused awareness, come Great Discoveries and a Great Beautiful Power.