Feelings are funny things. Everything in a day may have seemed to go perfectly fine, but then we find ourselves feeling down, or crabby in the evening. Just the same, we might feel ourselves being energetic or exuberant and not be sure why.
I strongly believe our feelings are a guidance system for us, to help us know when we are on the right or wrong path. Being in touch with our feelings is paramount to making the best decisions for ourselves. When we realize we feel unhappy, we need to stop and figure out why. Are we denying something that bothered us earlier in the day? Did something not happen that we had hoped would?
We should always try to feel the best we can. Sometimes we can find a simple solution to our unhappy feelings—perhaps we are “just” tired, hungry, overworked. We need a break or to eat something or a song to cheer us up and an hour later we feel better. Other times, we need to accept our feelings.
Maybe someone at work said something that hurt us. We acknowledge we felt hurt and then we move on. Perhaps we resolve to talk to the person, or we decide that person is not worth feeling badly about. We don’t have to react, and we don’t have to feel a certain way. But we do need to acknowledge the feeling.
I once read that how we react to a situation is based 20% on what is happening at the moment, and 80% upon what has happened in the past. Do we expect something to go wrong because it went wrong in the past? Do we expect a person to react a certain way to us because someone else reacted that way in the past to the same situation?
Feelings are often the result of the past. We can learn to consider the present, the living moment and ask ourselves whether our feelings match the current situation.
We can also let ourselves know that it is okay to feel however we do. We don’t have to feel guilty because we feel angry or sad about something. We can simply accept how we feel. Denying our feelings tends to give negative situations more power and attention than they deserve. Sometimes we just need to say to ourselves, “That’s the way it is, and this is how I feel about it.” Then we can turn our attention away from it and focus on something else. We can feel without wallowing in the feeling. Then we can reach for something to feel good about.
Irene Watson, MA, is author of The Sitting Swing: Finding Wisdom to Know the Difference, and co-editor of The Story that Must Be Told: True Tales of Transformation, and Authors Access: 30 Success Secrets for Authors and Publishers. She is a workshop leader, managing editor of Reader Views, and president of a non-profit Higher Power Foundation. Irene lives next to Barton Creek in Austin, TX, with her husband Robert.
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