Is it better to trust our feelings or our minds? On the whole our emotions are generally delivered from our unconscious nervous system not necessarily from our conscious thinking mind. Much of the time these animal like responses or feelings, just fire off under the radar moving us towards what we feel is good for us and away from what we feel is bad for us.
The important word here is ‘perceived’ – we no longer life in a world where we have to use our old animal instincts daily, yet they are still running in the background, unaware that the world we live in has moved from real danger like being eaten to perceived dangers such as will my boss like me, will my partner leave me etc.
It seems like the unconscious nervous system listens to the voices in our head and has no choice but to respond to their fearfulness (or happiness) and generate the appropriate feelings and emotions. Once you recognise this you can see that it is very possible to think bad thoughts and get bad feelings or think good thoughts and get good feelings, try it.
The natural progression is to begin to understand that we can change our emotions. By changing the stories we tell ourselves in our minds we can change our feelings. Even if we don’t believe the stories to be true this still works. As we realise we can do this emotions become less scary and we can even choose which emotion to have at any given instance.
It takes time to learn to do this, however it is really worthwhile.
However, to do this we need to see life from a new paradigm, one where we allow ourselves to be more vulnerable, where we accept that we have strengths and weaknesses and if we just let our flaws be our flaws, then nobody can attack us – they are just our flaws. Our ego doesn’t need to cover them up or mask them, we are just what we are and that is fine.
How to quieten a racing mind
One way to look at a racing mind is lots of characters all talking to each other. A judge that is judging everybody including yourself and a victim that feels everyone is against them, lots more characters too all discussing your life, what you should and shouldn’t do or say.
It’s important to realise that these voices are not talking to you, they are talking to each other based on the beliefs that you have about yourself, what you think you can or can’t do. If these voices were us we’d be able to tell them to stop, anyway be don’t have to listen to them and we certainly don’t have to believe them.
It may be hard to stop them talking, however, it is possible to not believe them or to doubt them, to use them to uncover errors in your thinking.
When old beliefs no longer serve you well
The path to emotional calmness and wellbeing is about letting go of the ego and dissolving old out of date beliefs, then not listening to the voices in your mind.
When you hear yourself saying “I’ll never be able to” or “I never could do that” you need to stop and recognise that those words are from a younger you, not the you of today. Find the lies in those statements and begin to dissolve them.
When you recognise these lies and change them with new stories of how you want the future to be, how you want to be, what you want to do, you will see that you can begin to doubt those old stories and real change can begin.
Often we need to work with somebody who can help us to see ourselves in a new light, a mentor or therapist who can gently guide us as we explore our thoughts and feelings on the way to more emotional calmness.
Learn more about Self Awareness . Visit John Glanvill’s site where you can explore more information about personal development and download Free Personal Growth Tools for your emotional calmness.
Here is what we recommend for learning hypnosis. The best self hypnosis products we've come across are by Dr. Mike Mandel. Get them here recordings.
For learning how to do hypnosis (including covert or conversational hypnosis), I recommend Igor Ledochowski.
To see our entire list of hypnosis downloads visit this page
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Fantastic post, I have tried a lot of self help items, some are good, some not so great.