You can manipulate your feelings to change your reality. Feelings are not the boss of you. You are the boss ! You can take control of your feelings and change the outcome of any situation. The only thing holding you back from your best life are your own feelings.
1. Its all in your head.
What we are thinking is our own reality not THE REALITY. Its all in our head ! Recently we had a nice cloudy day with cool temperatures. The wind was blowing lightly, the plants looked fresh, one could smell the leaves in the air. It was especially a welcome change after a blistering hot weather. I was loving it! I planned on going for a long walk along my neighborhood and felt happy. I assumed everybody would be on the same page, happy with this spring like weather in fall.
As I listened to the car radio, I was surprised to hear the newscaster forecast a gloomy day with no sun. Wait ! What happened ! Are we talking about the same weather ? Where I found a glorious day ahead of me, the newscaster found it gloomy, dull !
The fact was that the temperature was about 70 degrees and there was no sun. The rest was personal perspective, our own perception of the weather. It was all in our head. Gloomy or glorious were not facts. They were how we experienced the facts.
2. Feelings are not facts.
We have a chattering brain, which passes comments to us all day as we go through different situations. Its like we have a someone living inside us , giving us its take on the world. We believe this voice is always correct and we have to listen to it. But the truth is that its our past experiences, & past feelings that make us feel a certain way. This voice is our feeling. The problem arises when we give it too much credit and assume that our feeling is a truth and everyone else should also feel the same way. This results in conflict . No wonder we have so many misunderstood relationships and fights in the world.
3. Perception is deceiving
I remember going to a restaurant in Utah with friends on a road trip. It was a nice cozy place with people relaxing and having their dinner. Or was it ? Because one of my friends, lets call her Sara, felt that everyone turned around to stare at us as we were tourists. Perception is our interpretation of a situation based on past experiences. Perception creates its own reality. Hence the same situation but two different realities !
“Its funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.” RICK RIORDAN
4. Beliefs are personal
Beliefs are the lenses through which we see the world. Lets say you grow up being told that you are careless & have a negative view about yourself. As you continue to ponder upon these thoughts, soon you will start to BELIEVE that you are careless. Now assume that you go to a party and are a few minutes late due to an accident on the freeway. Everyone in the party including the host complements you about your new hairstyle but a single person comments that you are “latecomer”. Out of all the complements that you’ve received this one comment is going to stick to you and hurt you the most. You will be convinced that you are a careless person who can’t be on time ! Pretty sad ! You see your beliefs have changed your reality. No one told you that you were careless, your mind, your belief , your thoughts convinced you and made you think that you were careless. Its not a reality BUT for you it is.
5. Self-concept is your made up story
From your beliefs and experiences you have come upon a story in which you are the main character and you have written a script of how you are and how you will behave . Your self -concept can be statements like I AM CARELESS, I AM NOT SMART, I AM FUNNY, I CAN’T RUN, I CAN’T LOSE WEIGHT…. What happens next is that you start behaving in a way that your expectations from yourself start coming true. If you believe that you can’t lose weight, you continue to eat, don’t exercise and start gaining weight. Your thinking has created a reality based on your expectations.
Conclusion
Our thoughts have power and they can change our life. We have the power to change the reality. We can make our own reality. We can write the story of our life. Everything is in our hands ! As Plato said,
“Reality is created by the mind, we can change our reality by changing our mind.”
