Remember the time when you first learnt to drive a car? If you are like most people, you are likely to have felt overwhelmed at first, trying to use your eyes, hands and feet in co-ordination, while keeping in mind so many new rules of the road, and also watching for people who might be breaking some of those rules! When you put conscious effort and repeatedly practiced driving, over time driving became automatic and effortless. Such is the case with learning any new skill. With sufficient practice, you have to put very little conscious effort to do the very same complex act.
The above is especially true with the way we think. Just like learning to drive effortlessly, over time, we condition our minds to think in a certain way. Given a certain situation, an automatic and effortless set of thoughts come to our mind, and that set of thoughts bring forth a dominant feeling. The time interval between the external event and the feeling it generates is very short, usually in fractions of seconds. The feeling that we feel in response to the external event seems so automatic, that we naturally attribute the external event to have caused that feeling.
It is thus no wonder then that we use phrases like “You made me feel bad”, “She hurt me”, “Bob made me very angry”, “My boss irritates me” etc. The common thing about the statements is that we experience ourselves as some object who is subjected to some experience without consciously choosing to feel in a certain way. It is as if someone or something outside of us magically generated some feeling within us.
What we do not realize that between the external stimuli and the feeling we felt, it is we who thought a set of thoughts that gave a certain meaning to the event, which consequently generated our feeling. Yes, those thoughts may have been automatic and conditioned, just like we sometimes drive our car between home and work without being fully aware of our actions. If however, you get into an accident while driving home one day, you are responsible for the accident whether you were driving with fully awareness or not. In the same way, whether you are conscious of your thoughts that led to your feeling or not, you are responsible for how you feel, as you are the only driver of your own thoughts, not someone else!
You may have observed that two people undergoing the same life experience can end up feeling quite different from each other. This is because each one of us has a different conditioned thought response based on our past. The reason many of us do not feel in control of our emotions is that all our lives, we have programmed ourselves to think in dis-empowering ways. Once we become aware of our conditioned thoughts between stimulus and response, we can get complete control of our life back. This means that years of conditioned responses need to be unlearnt, and new empowered thinking habits needs to be put in it's place. This is like unlearning earlier habits of risky and dangerous driving and re-learning to drive safely.
Just like learning to drive, it does take quite some effort to reprogram ourselves to think in empowered ways, but the results are well worth it in the end. When we take charge of the way we think, instead of being victims of our life, we get complete control of how we feel in various life situations and thus become powerful creators of our own life.
The above is especially true with the way we think. Just like learning to drive effortlessly, over time, we condition our minds to think in a certain way. Given a certain situation, an automatic and effortless set of thoughts come to our mind, and that set of thoughts bring forth a dominant feeling. The time interval between the external event and the feeling it generates is very short, usually in fractions of seconds. The feeling that we feel in response to the external event seems so automatic, that we naturally attribute the external event to have caused that feeling.
It is thus no wonder then that we use phrases like “You made me feel bad”, “She hurt me”, “Bob made me very angry”, “My boss irritates me” etc. The common thing about the statements is that we experience ourselves as some object who is subjected to some experience without consciously choosing to feel in a certain way. It is as if someone or something outside of us magically generated some feeling within us.
What we do not realize that between the external stimuli and the feeling we felt, it is we who thought a set of thoughts that gave a certain meaning to the event, which consequently generated our feeling. Yes, those thoughts may have been automatic and conditioned, just like we sometimes drive our car between home and work without being fully aware of our actions. If however, you get into an accident while driving home one day, you are responsible for the accident whether you were driving with fully awareness or not. In the same way, whether you are conscious of your thoughts that led to your feeling or not, you are responsible for how you feel, as you are the only driver of your own thoughts, not someone else!
You may have observed that two people undergoing the same life experience can end up feeling quite different from each other. This is because each one of us has a different conditioned thought response based on our past. The reason many of us do not feel in control of our emotions is that all our lives, we have programmed ourselves to think in dis-empowering ways. Once we become aware of our conditioned thoughts between stimulus and response, we can get complete control of our life back. This means that years of conditioned responses need to be unlearnt, and new empowered thinking habits needs to be put in it's place. This is like unlearning earlier habits of risky and dangerous driving and re-learning to drive safely.
Just like learning to drive, it does take quite some effort to reprogram ourselves to think in empowered ways, but the results are well worth it in the end. When we take charge of the way we think, instead of being victims of our life, we get complete control of how we feel in various life situations and thus become powerful creators of our own life.
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