You Are in Charge of Your Own Vibration
You want to feel safe. You want to feel happy. You want to feel like your life has meaning and purpose. You want to feel inspired. You want to feel like you are adding to the love in the world.
Instead, these days, maybe you feel anxious, aimless, confused, or angry.
We are taught to feel driven by our emotions. We are taught that our feelings are caused by events outside of our minds.
Neither of these is true.
Adults taught us to be driven by our emotions because they believed this to be the way life is. They taught us by modeling. We learned to imitate them being flung around by whatever emotion was active in them at any given moment.
Adults taught us that our feelings are caused by the outside world because they believed it. And because it was a lazy way to try to control us. They had us believing that they could make us feel ashamed or afraid, safe or loved.
All of us have bought into these myths to some extent or another—even the most confident and stable people we know harbor places inside where they believe that the world outside them can cause them to feel one way or another.
About 15 years ago, I—a generally optimistic, positive, and happy person—was feeling down. Life was not going the way I had hoped. An important relationship was crumbling. My finances were in shambles. The people closest to me did not seem safe or trustworthy.
I was sitting at my computer having a conversation with my Inner Counselor (as I called it at the time). What do I need to know about being happier?
A download occurred that became my book, Being Truly Happy; Seven Secrets of Truly Happy People.
The first secret of truly happy people is that happiness is an inside job. It took me a while to understand this completely.
Now I understand that all emotions, every feeling we are capable of as humans exists as a line of energy within our consciousness. Inside. Within our own minds. Every one.
The art of managing our emotions is the art of choosing. Zeroing in on the feeling we prefer.
This does not mean that we should suppress, deny, or repress any emotion we are currently feeling. To suppress, deny, or repress emotional energy is a vast waste of energy and creates “hot spots” of energetic charge that can cause us problems later on.
It means that when we are experiencing feelings that we don’t like—maybe anger, helplessness, victimization, self-pity, hatred, grief, or sadness, for example—we can remember that our emotions are merely waves of energy. And we can remember that we have access to any emotion we would prefer instantly within ourselves.
Knowing that our feelings are waves of energy allows us to watch them pass through us. Most of us don’t know how to do this. We get engaged with stories that are tangentially attached to whatever emotion we are feeling. We reiterate the story in our mental chatter and this keeps re-igniting similar waves of energy.
Instead, we can step aside from the visceral experience—and the story--of the emotion and watch it flow. When we do this, we realize—sometimes very quickly—that the wave of feeling has its own dissolution. It flows, then it ebbs. Naturally.
I refer to this detached observation as processing emotions in real time.
With the ebbing of the wave of emotion, we can turn our attention to a feeling we prefer.
Because we have been so well-trained to imagine that our feelings are the result of something outside of ourselves, it is helpful—at first—to turn our attention to something pleasing. This can be an object or scene in our immediate surroundings, or it can be a pleasant memory or the pleasant anticipation of something we are looking forward to.
Using our attention this way helps us find the feelings we prefer. They are there, within us, patiently awaiting our attention to blossom. Over time, we can learn to choose pleasing emotions without reliance on any outside stimuli; we just find the feeling we are after and place our attention on it.
You can play with this idea right now. Imagine feeling discouraged. You are probably familiar with this feeling. Find it and feel it activating with your attention. What happens in your body? Your posture? What happens in your mind? What stories run through it?
Now turn your attention to a feeling of eagerness. You’re likely familiar with this feeling too. Search around inside until you find it. Then apply your attention to it and feel it grow within you. You will most likely sit up taller, breathe more deeply, maybe lean forward with excitement.
Abraham Hicks tells us that our emotions are most useful to us as a kind of barometer that shows us our level of alignment with the infinite within us. When we are aligned with our higher selves, with Infinite, Omnipresent Lovingkindness, with our eternal soul, we feel happy, peaceful, joyful, and creative. Less pleasing emotions such as anger, resentment, or anxiety tell us that we have turned our thoughts away from the thoughts of our highest selves. We have decided to perceive our current circumstances through a lens that the Infinite does not share.
When we actively seek positive emotions within, we are energetically aligning ourselves with the highest and best within us. We are shifting our energetic signature or vibration to match the wellbeing vibration of the Universe.
The more pleasant vibrations create ease in our bodies, but their effect does not stop there.
Imagine walking through town or the mall and observing the people around you. How does it feel to walk toward someone who is laughing with a companion? How does it feel to see people arguing?
The moods attitudes, and vibrations we cultivate within us ripple outward and touch the world around us.
Most of us pick up on these “vibes” and allow them to influence our own mood. We don’t have to be influenced by the demeanor of others—as we just discussed, we can choose our own emotions. But all too often, people are influenced by the vibes of others.
I think we would all like to be a positive influence in the world, walking around in a state of appreciation and joy, rather than scowling and upset.
Imagine being the one person in the crowd who can hold onto a sense of safety and wellbeing no matter what the people around us are choosing to feel.
Choosing our emotional/energetic signature is a skill that can be learned. It is a muscle that can be strengthened.
When we master this skill, we feel like we are holding the reins of our lives. We become influential in deep and meaningful ways. And the Universe will meet us where we stand, in peace and stability.
Happy Feeling, Everyone.
I received this article as I was writing the above. It has a great description of how to move from one feeling state to another. Enjoy. The Bliss Blog: What to Do with Rage
