Close your eyes, take a conscious breath, count while you inhale and then allow yourself to exhale slower. Take more counts to exhale as you did to inhale. Imagine silence; what would sound like if there was absolute silence around you right now? Notice your thoughts and your feelings; what are you feeling right now? Accept the emotion, it is okay to feel what you feel.

Think of a relationship that is bugging you, a pain or irritation that you have. It could be a dull ache or a sharp pain - what are you feeling? If you were talking to that person what would you really want to say? Accept it, it is okay to want to say that. You can’t tell someone not to feel what they are feeling or even be upset with yourself for the way you feel, but by accepting your feelings, you open the doorway to evolve them. There are no good or bad feelings. Anger is the emotion that led revolutions, sadness causes empathy and compassion, but we need to be discerning. The emotions we carry should empower us and enable us to go where we want to go, where we believe joy resides.

So many questions

When I turned to homeopathy medicine, in my first meeting with my doctor, he asked me about events in my life and the feelings I had attached to them. When I said that a particular event made me feel upset, he asked what that “upset” felt like. Through the course of questioning, we went from upset to anger to guilt, to shame, to helplessness and a whole range of emotions. Our emotions are not black or white, but rather we experience layers of emotions and they in turn determine our actions. Derived from Latin, emotion is what causes us to move – to take action. This is why we often feel more confused when we are emotionally charged up. When we are angry, we feel that we have been unfairly treated and we want to punish. When we are frustrated, we move to helplessness and loss of control and we feel like “giving up”. When we feel joy, we experience life as wonderful and we want to celebrate. When we feel sadness, if it is for another, we become empathetic.

Moving from disempowering emotions to empowering ones.

Let’s look at an example of feeling frustrated. I feel frustrated, because I promised to have this draft ready by tonight and I am doing everything I can to finish it but in spite of that, I just can’t. Everything seems to be working against me and it is becoming so hard that I have no control at all. I feel like giving up. That’s the linguistic breaking down of frustration. But now to delve deeper into frustration and help bring myself from a disempowering emotion to an empowering one, I would lead myself or a life coaching client to associate the feeling of pure joy, confidence, pride, gratitude, acceptance and excitement with their goal or with a desirable outcome or result in their lives. At this point, often “giving up” is no longer an option and we will crawl or leap out of the frustrated space and into motivation again. A good coach trained in Ontological Coaching will coach from his or her own wounds.

The Blame Game

When we are afraid of an undesirable outcome, we often unconsciously play the blame game. So in the story above, where I was frustrated because I felt I could not finish my draft, in order to feel better in the short term, I could easily start to blame the Internet service provider, blame someone for not helping me or something for the fact that I am unable to succeed, and blame myself and feel guilty for being incompetent even though I am a life coach. Self blame, which is guilt, is also extremely paralysing.

This is a very common trap that we fall into. Let me stack up enough reasons and excuses and people to blame for my inability to succeed! This disempowering way of thinking will assure you of one thing only, undesirable results. So as you may have heard these before, you can either have results or reasons, you can be a victim or a victor. You choose, and guess what, your reasons will always sound very very reasonable, as they often are, we have all had pity parties about Internet providers, accountants, exes, in laws and partners. But like I said, you can have a stack full of very reasonable reasons and excuses or you can have the results you desire. Many of the results we want are not ordinary. We are going upstream against the tide. We want what few have managed to achieve; so guess what, our effort needs to be unreasonable. We can’t sit back and do just enough and stop whenever we have people or circumstances to blame, we keep fighting on and moving on.

So, ask yourself, which emotion will help you get results faster, the emotions that allow blame or those that encourage responsibility? I am so fed up and irritable today! Living in a mood of being irritable and fed up will only attract more and more evidence for you to back the emotion. You will be looking for them subconsciously and almost satisfied that you are right again at how difficult everything is. To you I ask, would you rather be right or happy? For those who study astrology, you may be aware that between we are in the midst of a huge Lunar Eclipse which will occur mainly on the 15th that the moon’s cycles and planetary alignment affect our mood, I do not disagree, but I won’t allow myself to give up or stay irritable on account of the stars! Be firm with yourself to stop complaining.

BDST: 1840 HRS, APR-17, 2016
Edited by: Sharmina Islam, Lifestyle Editor