Tag Archives: Calmness

21

Emotional

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Through this human experience, we are inundated daily with all sorts of emotions.  Emotions are defined as: “a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others.” They are our feelings, and unless you learn how to deal with them, they will deal with you.

These are things we face every moment of every day, but very few people look at what their emotions mean or, more importantly, what they are trying to communicate to us.  Emotions control much of what we do and how we relate to others in our lives. Take a moment and investigate how your feelings are affecting your daily existence.  Why are they so important? Where do they come from? How can we deal with them more helpfully? These answers will help you function more truly and honestly in your life.  You will cease to be at the mercy of the seemingly random appearance of your emotions because you will know where they come from.   You are not your emotions of love or anger or fear; how you react to them makes you who you are.

Why Emotions Are Important

Our emotions come from our thoughts, and most often, our thoughts are a reaction to the experience we are having or, more often, to experiences we had in the past. As we experience our daily lives, situations arise which stimulate thoughts. We have a complete memory bank of skills. When something happening now reminds us of something from the past, emotions are triggered, like a warning about suffering or pleasure from history that we might repeat shortly.  Anger, for example, is the face of fear. We get angry when thoughts that might not meet our needs are front and center in our minds. Many people get into the habit of using anger as a default to getting what they want, getting mad any time anyone challenges them, or not going exactly the way they want. These emotional responses are not healthy because, over time, anger takes its toll on your body, and more significantly, your relationships. Nobody wants to spend quality time with a ticking time bomb.

Our emotions tell us things that words can’t articulate, and learning to decipher these feelings rather than react mindlessly to them gives us a chance to be better and create healthier relationships. Start to look at your emotions pragmatically, from the perspective of, where did this come from? What is it you are feeling, and why do you feel this way right now? Every thought comes complete with a corresponding emotional response. Emotions are important because they are away. We communicate with the world and ourselves.  To ignore or suppress your feelings is a good recipe for poor mental and physical health. What is inside of you and how you feel will eventually come to the surface. You can decide if it is through a gentle investigation of how you think or an explosion of emotional steam after weeks, months, or years of psychological repression. Take care of your emotions, and they will take care of you. Listen to them, and they will provide you with a direction of where you need to go.

Watching Emotions

Rather than let your emotions dictate your words, actions, and life experience, the moment you feel them, take a minute and allow yourself to feel what you are feeling. Our bodies are excellent because they think the stimulus from outside is like hot and cold, but also feel an incentive that comes from inside, like happy or sad. Rather than being controlled by your emotions, take a second and let it be there. The sentiment is a feeling or response, and you can sit back and observe it. What is causing it? What is the stimulus of this thing? It could be a link to some experience from your childhood, which is irrelevant today. When you can observe the emotion, you are no longer part of that response. You are separate from it.

Doing this successfully will allow you to investigate what is going on inside of you at that moment.  Watch the thoughts you are thinking, which have the emotion attached.  Watch your inner world unfold and ask questions about the genesis of your emotional responses. Doing this will allow you to understand yourself better and relate to the world and those in it.  Being effective at this will allow you the chance to become more in charge of your emotional health. Although you will never be able to control your emotions, you can understand how to work with them healthily and use the information they are sending you. Rather than just reacting in a mindless, subconscious way.  It takes time and effort to do this, but it will give you a better understanding of yourself and others when you become better at this.

Documenting Your Emotions

To start to practice this, you need to take some simple action. Start by documenting your emotions. Look back at your day and write down when you had an intense emotional response. Notice these feelings and how they affected you. Then follow it to its roots. What was the situation? What was said? Who was there? What were you thinking? Which of your thoughts are tied to which emotional response? All of this information is available to you every day and in all situations. You have to be willing to investigate, document, and get to know yourself in the emotional realm.  Each time you put your emotions down on paper, you will build a more reliable connection with yourself, where you came from, and what it is that you need to deal with. Negative emotions are dangerous to your health, and of course, your relationships, and to be at their mercy makes you a reactor to life.

When you know which situations or thoughts lead you to love, fear, sadness, happiness, or any other emotion, then you are in control of things. Isn’t anxiety a response to thoughts that create fear? Look for the ideas that put you in a negative emotional state and shine a light on them. Explore them. Understand them. Like a monster under the bed, a little light will reveal that you are spending your time entertaining unnecessary thoughts of fear. There is a freedom that comes from understanding yourself in all facets because understanding and knowledge are always the keys to power, and in this case, it is your power.

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”-Horace Walpole.

“Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.”-Elizabeth Gilbert.

“We all live at the mercy of our emotions. Our emotions influence and shape our desires, thoughts, and behaviors and above all our destiny.”-Dr. T.P.Chia

 

21

Inner Calm

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In any 24 hours, if you venture out into the world, there will be challenges you will face. The battleground for most of these things is going to be in our heads. I often face challenges to maintain a positive attitude or not to be overwhelmed by a poor perspective of things. Anger is an emotion designed as a warning for us. To make sure we know when something isn’t right, or more precisely, that you are afraid. Afraid that your needs aren’t going to be met by a loss of one form or another. Most often, anger is a waste of time. Moving beyond unhealthy emotions of anger, judgment, greed, or cruelty smoothly, quickly, and healthily can make your life a much more pleasant experience. One of the best things we can do is to create a positive space in our mind; it is a skill that anyone can master if they want to.

Be a Reader, Not a Reactor to Thoughts

Thoughts are occurring in our minds at a rapid pace all day long. You have a choice of which ones you listen to and which ones you let pass you by. It is good practice to start to pay attention to the thoughts you allow to affect you positively and negatively. As humans, we are capable of keeping only one thing in our focus at a time. If you choose to focus on a negative, that will trigger negative emotional responses physically in your body. Once you start to drop down a negative chute of thought, it will focus on itself.

Read the negative thought and notice it, and then let it go and choose a more positive view to focus on. Once accomplished, your body will react, and you will move down a more positive chute. Thoughts build on each other, and a focus develops. Read your thoughts and know where they are taking you. The alternative is to let your dreams run wild and spend your time merely reacting at the mercy of whatever your mind creates. That is how many people live their lives. It leads to wild swings or emotions and unpredictable behavior. Focus on your thoughts and dismiss those that aren’t an accurate representation of who you are and who you want to be. Let them slide by you like flies in the darkness.

Real Focus Develops

One of the best methods to develop a focus on positive thoughts is meditation. Most people picture incense, candles, and chanting when they think of meditating, but that is just a stereotype. Many people practice meditation without knowing it. Whenever you calm your mind and notice your thoughts, you are contemplating. It can be through intense concentration on a task or a conscious effort to notice your breathing. There is a calmness that will take over your mind and body if you stop the mind from running wild and focus on something other than your thought. Thoughts then come to you but are very noticeable as something outside of you.

The peaceful calm that will move over you when you seek calmness will allow you to look deep inside yourself and get to know your true self. Some say that is where your real power exists. Once the thoughts are quiet, a real focus can develop on what you want in your life and what you don’t. Clear goals can materialize, and actual plans for achieving them come into your reality. Focus on the calmness of mediation and see what you can accomplish.

Calmness is a power

There is an ability to bring your inner strength to bear against any challenge you will face the ability to calm your mind at will allows those without this asset to can’t. Inside us all, there is a strength hidden most of the time but can be channeled and used to enable you to thrive and survive when it seems doubtful. Much of our suffering occurs because we desire things to come to us a certain way. Without it, we are in trouble.

But there is the self-confidence that we develop, left to our own devices as children we have it, but time, experience, and the will of others push it down deep. Challenges come in life as a chance to bring them out. Sometimes we fail, are overwhelmed, and never get there. But ………sometimes we do not fail, and we remember the fact that we are strong enough t0 handle what life is throwing our way. Whatever that is, addiction, poverty, or loss. Inside of us is the strength to take it. Finding that strength is helped by developing a calmness about you.

Focus on methods to see the tone and tenor of your thoughts. Look for the ones that make your life a better experience and leave the negative behind. Learning to focus your mind and see what it is doing can allow you to find success and overcome any challenge you face.

“Calm mind brings inner strength and self-confidence, so that’s very important for good health.” -Dalai Lama

“Getting stress out of your life takes more than prayer alone. You must take action to make changes and stop doing whatever is causing the stress. You can learn to calm down in the way you handle things.”-Joyce Meyer

“You don’t have to control your thoughts. You have to stop letting them control you.”-Dan Millman

 

21

Calm

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Calm Leads To Power

My goal is to establish a positive focus every morning by focusing on a positive word or phrase. There are enough negative influences in my world, and I believe that we can improve our emotions, words, and actions and make the world a better place one thought, feeling, word, and move at a time through a conscious direction of our thinking. It is easy to lose yourself and your focus in the whirl of activities and distractions we are bombarded in each moment: social media, video games, popular culture, and everything else we are exposed to. Let’s face it, and we have more technology in our phones than we had in the entire school of our youths.  Calmness is a feeling of relaxation and clear thinking, and we can get it at almost any time through mindful breathing and meditation. There is a power in the calm for you to direct your focus in the directions that will be beneficial to you and away from what other people might think you should spend some time and effort finding your calm today.

What does it mean to be Calm?

When you look at your inside world, where thoughts and emotions jumble together to create your consciousness, the ability to organize and regulate will allow you to function at a high level. You will be able to develop better relationships and be more productive if you can remain calm in the chaos of your thoughts.  To be calm is not to let your emotions dominate your behavior but to become the master of them and allow a transparent thought process to dictate your actions, not the irrational and erratic activities of emotions.  This calm is easy to explain but not so easy to master, so I implore you today to make being calm a part of your consciousness!

Storms Come For Growth

Life, as always, is a very willing teacher in the mastery of your calmness. To write or think about controlling your emotions in the abstract is all well and good. But what about when you are in the throws of emotions. Strong emotions come into our experience, and you can’t just ignore them; you have to deal with them in some form or fashion.  Life will present you with plenty of challenges to provide opportunities to grow.  For me, it is a chance to become a better practitioner of the things I think.  Emotions are not a weakness but giving in to their irrational behavior is.

The parts of the brain which control the regulation of emotions are also the ones that handle working memory, which involves your awareness and allows you to remain focused on the information you are taking in. As a result, you can determine relevant from irrelevant.  In short, you can function as a thinking human being and do things efficiently.  When your emotions are disturbed, then this part of the brain goes offline.  Calmness and learning to maintain your thought regulation under challenging circumstances is the power of your serenity. To function fully when the world is crashing, emotionally, all around you.  That is the goal of bringing calm into the front of your consciousness.

Some Calmness Ideas

So that is why you want to be calm, but how do you become better at it.  Learning to master your thoughts and understand how they affect you emotionally is the first step. Each of our thoughts are connected to emotion; it could be anger, happiness, contentment, restlessness, fear, or calm.  We have been conditioned in life to react to certain thought situations in a certain way. Understanding what these situations are for us is the first step.  To do this, one of the best tools you have is meditation.

Meditation is the simple act of learning to manage your thoughts and emotions in an organized way. It is nothing more than that. It doesn’t take a lot of skill or talent. Practice focusing your concentration on the thoughts you have and the effect they have on you.  Simple instructions can be gained today through an app on your phone.  Focused breathing works for me to get my mind under control, but other people use different techniques. The goal is to find calm in the mess of your mind, so keep trying to find the best method of meditation for you.

Mindfulness From This

Mindfulness, or living in the present moment, is another good focus to bring calm to your thoughts and your life. Many of the ideas that disturb our lives and mix up our guide are those spent on regrets of the past and worries about the future.  The only moment we are guaranteed is right here and right now.  Our mind is a powerful and creative tool that, left unchecked, can create wildly negative scenarios that might happen in the future.  All are based on fear and worry. Most of these will never happen, and if they did, you would handle them.

The past is great for learning. It would be foolish not to use the experience from the past to become better today. However, it can be as detrimental to you as worrying about the future.  We all have done things, made decisions, and had experiences in the past that we carry regrets about. The past is gone, and we can’t get it back, no matter what we do.  All of our programming, the emotional responses we have to events today were created there. So a clear understanding of the emotions we felt all of our lives allows us to deal with today in a much more efficient manner.  Bring that knowledge into the present moment where it can do you some good.

Be Calm Today

Look at your emotions today and start to build some emotional understanding. It isn’t easy to remain calm if we never deal with or talk about our feelings.  At least, you may create a fake peace by ignoring an emotion and dismissing it for the time being, but these things will come back to you and erupt like a volcano if you don’t release the emotional pressure a bit at a time.  Releasing your tension comes by recognizing what you feel and expressing that, and hopefully talking about why you think the way you do.

Developing the ability to maintain calm in your emotional storm will allow you to create an effective, inspirational regulation program. This peacefulness keeps your brain from going offline when you hit an emotional event and will enable you to perform better, understand yourself more and become better as people. So bring the factor of calm into your consciousness today and take a look at your emotions.

“It’s all about finding the calm in the chaos.” Donna Karen

“Ships don’t sink because of the water around them; ships sink because of the water that gets in them. Don’t let what’s happening around you get inside you and weigh you down.” Anonymous

“Calmness is the cradle of power.” Josiah Gilbert Holland

“I breathe in calmness, I breathe out stress.” Anonymous