If your attention is in your head, and you’re going over stories, worries, and resentments for the zillionth time, there’s no way you’re going to experience the joy and celebration you just somehow know are possible.
Something in you knows that you weren’t put on this earth to always feel ill-at-ease and bothered. Something in you knows that joy and celebration are possible for you—you just don’t know how to find your way to them.
Space for Joy
I saw how this works firsthand when I was speaking with a client the other day. She was telling me about complicated family dynamics involving conflict, chaos, and various kinds of dysfunction.
There were a lot of stories, and I started asking myself where she was going with all of them.
I politely interrupted her and invited her to bring her attention to her feelings and the sensations in her body. She found nausea in the pit of her stomach along with sadness and resentment—and she noticed a tendency to avoid these feelings by going back into her thoughts.
Does that ring a bell—avoiding what you’re feeling by going into your thoughts?
Taking me up on the invitation to stay with the feelings instead of going back into the story, within a few minutes, her eyes lit up. She told me she suddenly felt a burst of joy and excitement about an upcoming positive event.
What We Miss
If she had kept avoiding the feelings in her body—and kept spinning around in the narrative in her mind—would she have experienced the aliveness of feeling joyful and excited? No. Her attention would have been tangled up with the endless retelling of why her family members should be different than they are.
And she would have missed out on being conscious of her present moment experience. She would have missed the opportunity to bring kindness and acceptance to what she was feeling.
And she would have missed the joy that appeared once her mind stopped chewing on so many thoughts.
For many of us, the repetitive swirl of thoughts in our minds is a familiar home base.
We think we’re going to find solutions if we keep thinking about the problems.
We think we’ll successfully avoid our emotions if we don’t let ourselves feel them.
We’re just used to thinking a lot and don’t consider any alternatives—even if we’re miserable.
What are you missing out on by trying to solve unsolvable situations in your mind? What is possible for you if you’re mind-space isn’t full of thoughts and the tension that comes with avoiding feelings?
There’s only one way to find out. And it’s the sacred step that sets you free.
The Sacred Step that Sets You Free
Take a breath and open to whatever you’re experiencing. Be the spacious presence that accepts whatever arises unconditionally. It’s so simple—and utterly glorious.
Your mind will tell you that you’ll be stuck in painful feelings forever. But this is the mind’s strategy to keep you thinking.
Instead, expand beyond your familiar and limited ideas of yourself. Consider a new and fresh approach, which is to open to what’s here with an overflowing generous heart.
Trust your inner knowing to guide you to explore the expansiveness of being present.
Peace, joy, gratitude, celebration, love…these are all right here, available to you when you end the fight with your experience.
But you won’t find them in your mind. And they won’t have space to blossom if your mind is perpetually busy.
Welcome your feelings fully, and soon they’ll settle. Then you’re primed to discover the spaciousness from which infinite possibilities emerge.
What About You?
Are you available for joy and celebration? Reports or questions? I’d love to hear…