Feeling restless, irritable or discontent? You should do something about it right? Wrong!
Picture the last time you were feeling annoyed. Recollect what you did when you felt the annoyance. If you are like most people, you would have tried to fix the situation. We try to fix the feeling by eating at it, drinking at it, working at it, Netflixing at it, Instagramming at it….. Basically, anything so that we don’t have to look at it. Why?
It takes enormous courage and energy to face up to our own feelings. We think we are taking the easy way out by not facing up to them. But reality is that ignoring them or suppressing them does not work. The underlying feelings will keep resurfacing again and again.
Think about your last few days. Did you have any rough days? What specifically made it rough? Now, zoom out and think about the feeling. Perhaps you were annoyed by your partner or boss, perhaps you were sad about life or perhaps it was something else. Now, think about whether this was the first time you experienced that feeling. The names and faces change, but the underlying feelings are often the same. Even deeper, the causes for the underlying feelings are also the same – fear is related to survival, anger to desire etc.
So what’s the antidote? Don’t try to fix the feeling. Instead give it the light of awareness. Don’t do something. Just stand there. All the feelings need is to be really seen, just like us. Once we can do that, the feelings will automatically start subsiding. But the key is to really experience the feelings, not push them away or fix them.