A Way Of Living Beyond Your Feelings

People talk about Meditation as an exercise to relax, as a tool to get more mental clarity, as a way to make yourself seem interesting… However, in my belief, one of the most important benefits of meditation is that it shows you how to live beyond your feelings.

What do I mean by this? Living in your feelings means to be happy only when I feel happy and to be sad whenever I feel sad. It means being controlled by your emotions.

Living beyond your feelings works the other way around. You become in control of your emotions and you keep doing what you think is the right thing to do no matter how you feel.

When you master your emotions and feelings, you learn to live by your values and achievement. You learn to choose the right action even if it doesn’t feel good.

There is so much more to the human experience yet mostly every one of us, is stuck trying to feel good.

“Remember that we cannot judge the moral value of any action by how we feel. Our feelings are unreliable and cannot be trusted to convey truth.” ― Joyce Meyer

How Meditation Changes Everything?

Meditation changes everything because it trains you to identify your feelings and it constantly gives you the feedback of: “You are not your feelings”.

Let me explain. I see meditation as sitting down with a stick and waiting for a feeling or a sensation to arise. Once the sensation or feeling arises you touch it a couple of times with your stick saying; sensation, sensation, sensation.

Then the sensation goes away and something else arises so you get your stick again and touch it saying; emotion, emotion, emotion.

Congratulations! You just learned how to meditate!

You can try this exercise at home. You also don’t need an actual stick, just imagine it (so you avoid hitting someone).

Back to the why, when we start that process of meditating the sensations around us, we internalize (make (attitudes or behavior) part of one’s nature by learning or unconscious assimilation) that emotions come and go like water from a source and that we are just the vessel, not those emotions itself.

That’s the first step towards living beyond your emotions.

Basically, meditation helps you to internalize the process of having emotions and experiencing them. You are not angry, you feel anger. You are not sad, you feel sadness, etc, etc, etc.

Once we see it this way is like experiencing emotions from outside yourself. Then you gain an objective perspective. Now, instead of being carried away by your anger and sadness, you will think it twice and look for the options that get the results that are more beneficial for you.

All of this just by sitting with your imaginary sticks for 20 minutes a day! Impressive, but that’s just the surface of it.

How Living Beyond Feeling Happy Can Be A Good Thing?

Living beyond “bad” emotions is one thing but what about living beyond the good ones? You will be asking yourself.

Well, joy is indeed a good thing but meditation shows us that it is also temporary and you need to keep living. You can’t wait for that joy or happiness to come to live the way you always wanted. That is the matter here.

That’s why feeling happiness or joy is another trap that I recently discovered. Because we get stuck on this emotion waiting to come so you can be alive again, so you can do brilliant things and activities and be in a world of rainbows and unicorns.

However, in the meantime, you find yourself lifeless, sitting on the couch with a dark cloud above your head complaining because your life is s**t.

As an example, I have been driven by feelings most of my life. Mostly the feeling of happiness.

If “I was happy”, I was productive, confident, energetic… However, when I wasn’t happy, I was literally unable to do anything well. I would manage to do things but the quality… let’s not talk about it.

What I am trying to tell you is that I was a slave of the feeling of happiness to actually live my life the way I wanted. Luckily, I got tired of waiting.

“So this is it ⎯ what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty.” ― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

How You Can Truly Live Beyond Your Feelings

Here is the good stuff. What about creating emotions instead of waiting for them to arise?

With meditation, first, we learn how to get over our feelings and pursue the actions we believe to be the best for us. In my case, not to need to feel happy to do great things.

Now we are talking about creating that happiness to use it whenever we need it. Because, of course, life seems better when we feel happy. When we keep practicing meditation and we dig deeper, the magic starts to happen.

Emotions like plants have to grow from somewhere, the seeds. In the meditative state, we start to spin the threads in between our emotions and what it causes them. Once we find that seed, we will be able to create emotions at will; If I want to feel happy, I can do this. If I want to feel relaxed I can do that…

Easy right? Well, actually is not at all. Even if the explanation seems simple the actual practice is hard work. It takes a lot of practice to build the necessary focus just to identify our emotions. To create them at will is another thing.

A Little Meditation Exercise

Try this exercise yourself and you will know what I mean by not being that easy as it sounds.

Exercise: Sit down in a quiet room and for 20 minutes and focus on your breathing. Don’t control the breathing, just focus on it. Observe how the air comes in and how it comes out. That’s it.

If you never meditated before, I’m sure you won’t be able to hold your focus without getting distracted for more than 1 or 2 minutes.

This article was first published by me, Dario Navarro at my website www.growingyourwildlife.com.