10/15/2017
Change Your Thinking About Feelings, Resilience, and Well-being
The never-ending challenges of life can beat you up and wear you down. Issues of physical health, family stress, financial pressures and work-related struggles can drain your emotional energy to the point that feelings of frustration, fatigue and confusion roll over you like dark waves.There are times when you feel like just one more crisis could cause you to “lose it.”
Working through the variety of difficulties of my own life I have come to see that there is a God-given resilience available to each of us. It is as close as our next thought if we will just turn from the noisy chaos that surrounds us, and embrace the resources we have within us.
The fact is this — our experience of life is fundamentally an internal process of mind and heart. We see, hear, smell, taste and touch what happens around us but we FEEL our thoughts: the words, images, and impressions that we sense and process internally. This is the way life works.
What can I do about that feeling of anger when my teenager blows up at me, the concern I have as a cancer survivor about an unusual pain or x-ray irregularity, the little flash of worry that comes when I get an unanticipated auto repair bill? Each of these is essentially an internal mental experience, not a direct experience of external events and circumstances.
Every moment of every day, our minds are working to make sense out of what we see and experience. Every feeling, negative or positive, is a direct result of thought. It’s impossible to have jealous feelings without first having jealous thoughts, to have sad feelings without first having sad thoughts, to feel angry without having angry thoughts. And it’s impossible to be depressed without having depressing thoughts. This seems obvious, but if it were better understood, we would all live better and experience greater resilience in the struggles of life.
It’s not that I can or should control my thoughts, but the external happenings of the world around me are not in control either. I realize that I am feeling my thinking, and thoughts are just thoughts. I feel what I feel, but the feelings are produced internally, as thought in the moment processes my perceptions of data coming in through my senses. Stumbling along in this understanding, like a small child learning to walk, I am finding that this awareness allows resilience to rise to the surface of my life.
The negative effects of thought come about when we forget that thought is just a function of mental consciousness — an ability that we as human beings have. We are the producers of our own thinking. Thought is not something that happens to us, but something that we do. It comes from inside of us, not from the outside. What we think determines what we experience, even though it often seems the other way around.
William James, the father of American psychology, once said, “Thinking is the grand originator of our experience.” Every experience and perception in life is based in thought. We have innocently learned to interpret our thinking as “reality,” but thought is merely an ability that we have. We are the ones who produce those thoughts. We internally create our perceptions, our feelings, our experience of life.
When we realize that thinking is a subjective ability rather than an objective reality, we can dismiss any negative thoughts that happen to pass through our minds. As we do so, a positive feeling of well-being begins to emerge. If we cling to negative thoughts, giving them too much attention to or dwelling on them, we lose the positive feeling and feel the effects of the negativity.
This understanding of the way thought creates our experience is a life-changing insight. We don’t have to be in conflict with our environment or with the people around us. We can sustain a positive attitude because we are no longer compelled to embrace every thought that passes through our consciousness. You may have no control over what people do, but you can be immune from the effects of your thinking about them. Your thinking, not your circumstances, determine how you feel. Letting go of negative thought as it occurs moment to moment, allows an innately positive sense of well-being to emerge as the dominant tone of life.
Author: Charlie Williams
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