How do you manage your emotional life? Is it managed from the inside out or outside in? Do you take responsibility for how you think and act because every action or reaction originates within you, or do you outsource your emotional management to situations and individuals around you? Do you blame the circumstances you deal with regularly as the source of your problems, or understand that regardless of the circumstances, you have the ability to choose how you think and how you feel?
The truth is, that most people tend to work from the outside in model. It’s much easier to do because you are no longer the root of the problem, everything else is. Everything else is why you are not happy, why you’re depressed, why you’re angry or bitter or resentful.
Everyone else is why you don’t have what you want or they are the ones holding you back in life. It’s all the things “out there” that are the real source of your troubles.
Operating from this viewpoint does nothing beneficial for anyone. If the problem’s out there, then how could you ever fix the situation? If the problem is with another person, how could you ever mend the relationship?
How can you ever expect anything to get better? This mentality means you have a complete lack of control over any of the situations in your life, which essentially means you are a perpetual victim of your circumstances.
Blaming everything else around you for your problems keeps you trapped in a cycle of negativity, leaving you feeling like a ship lost at sea.
There’s no hope. There’s no end in sight. The storms just keep piling up and the best you can do is ride them out and hope, wish, and pray life will miraculously change.
While I do believe in miraculous transformations, I haven’t seen that to be the case with most people.
Transformations Usually Take Time
Why? Because you have to go through a renewing process within yourself.
Imagine your mind is a huge plot of unmanaged earth. The soil is fertile, but it’s been left unattended for years.
Weeds, trees, and shrubs that represent your scattered thoughts, emotional reactions, etc. are all you can see as you venture out into the field.
Taking this plot of earth to a well-tilled field is going to take time and effort.
Consistency in cultivating your new crops will need to be at the forefront of your mind every day.
It’s also not enough to simply till the field and then plant a new crop for harvest because the mind doesn’t work that way. As soon as you pull a weed, another one will start to grow in its place.
If these weeds are negative thoughts or thoughts that keep you trapped in your normal emotional patterns and behaviors, then it means you have to pull the weed and plant the thought you want to think. Over and over again.
Planting a new crop doesn’t necessarily work either because the weeds will simply rise up and choke the life out of the new crop, or positive thoughts you’re trying to think.
Daunting is probably a good way to describe this task, however, it doesn’t have to be daunting.
You Can Achieve Freedom Without Feeling Overwhelmed…
…if you can learn how to play the long game.
This means giving yourself the grace necessary to mess up. To not get it right. To fall back into old patterns of thinking and behavior. To pick yourself up again when you do fall, and to continue doing so until you have the breakthrough you’re looking for.
Learning to control your thoughts is where it’s at. It’s going from the unconscious to the conscious. You become aware of everything you think, and those thoughts you don’t want to think, you deny them access to your inner sanctum.
How you control your thoughts is the key!
“As the fletcher whittles and makes straight his arrows, so the master directs his straying thoughts.”
Buddha
You have to come to a place where you are the master of your thoughts. As you go along, you will find that there is one area you are able to master, but still, other areas seem lackadaisical. This is okay, you are playing the long game, remember.
Finish uprooting the weeds or thoughts in one area of your life and you’ll start to find freedom in all areas, however, some of those other areas will need tending to as well. Once you’ve finished with the first, you move on to the next.
Initially, getting the first thoughts under control may take time, but once you’ve done it and you can do it repeatedly, it becomes a habit, which in turn allows you to focus on other thought patterns.
Expecting to have this completed instantaneously is futile. Most of the greatest spiritual teachers who have ever walked the planet have spent years in meditation, solitude, fasting, etc. to discipline their minds. To become the master of their minds.
Prepare Yourself to Play the Long Game
If you don’t prepare yourself to play the long game, disappointment will quickly follow. In a moment of weakness, you’ll give in and give up. If something triggers you back into how you used to feel, you may think all the work you’ve done up until that point is worthless.
Going into this with the idea that this could take months or even years, can help alleviate some of the stress of “getting it right”. Set a goal to guard and watch your thoughts for the next six months and see where that leads.
After six months, reassess where you are. You may need more time. You may have found a sense of relief but maybe you haven’t fully realized the freedom you’re looking for. That’s okay. That’s why you’re playing the long game.
This whole adventure isn’t about being perfect or doing it right, right now. It’s about living life. You can even find joy in the process if you allow yourself to just let go.
Letting go will actually speed up the amount of time it takes to find freedom. But don’t let the letting-go mentality overtake what you’re doing and steamroll you into a feeling of despair.
Balance is crucial as you go through this process. You have to move with the ebb and flow of the tide.
Some days may seem to go great only to have your world rocked the next and feel as if everything you’re doing is futile, so why do it in the first place? If you can keep your wits about you though, you can bring yourself back quickly and rebalance the scales.
I believe that each one of us has these mental or emotional issues that need to be tamed. It may look different from person to person, but each of us has something holding us back from reaching our ultimate potential.
Going back to the beginning of this article, the more you work on yourself, the more you realize that YOU are actually the problem. How you act and react is what’s really causing the internal drama you experience.
Realistically speaking, it’s not your circumstances or situations, it’s not your family, friends, or work colleagues that are the issue. They are just pieces of this life happening around you. Many of them are out of your control, so why fret over it?
Learn to roll with it instead. Don’t just passively let things happen to you if you can influence the situation, but be cognizant of the fact that some things are just out of your control.
Influencing the situation doesn’t mean barreling through just so you can get what you want. That’s an egotistical approach that will only keep you trapped where you are, pointing fingers at everything and everybody else.
Every time you take responsibility for your thoughts and actions, every time you realize you acted or reacted in a way that doesn’t serve you or others, you get closer to your freedom.
Don’t Talk Yourself Out of Your Freedom
Another thing to remember as you go along on this journey is you will face many instances when you feel like giving up. The transformation won’t happen quickly enough for you, so you’ll want to give up. You’ll face a series of days or weeks where you fall back into your old thought patterns and you’ll think this isn’t working, so you’ll give up.
You will have days where you won’t want to work on transforming your life, so you’ll give up. You’ll feel too tired to keep trying, so you’ll give up. There will be a million and one excuses why it isn’t working and why you’ll never get to where you want to be.
All I can say is be prepared to suck it up!
Because getting back on track is where it’s at. If you can continually pick yourself up after you’ve fallen, then you will see the light at the end of the tunnel faster than you might think.
Don’t compare your journey to anyone else’s either. Stay in your lane, eyes on the prize. When your car runs out of fuel, grab a bike. When the tires fall off the bike, start walking. When the soles of your shoes fall off and your feet start to blister and bleed, start crawling. When you’re too tired to crawl, lay sideways and roll yourself to the finish line.
It doesn’t have to go this way, I’m just saying, be prepared to do the work. Whatever it takes. Day in, day out. Rain or shine.
The sooner you learn how to control and become the master of your thoughts, the sooner you’ll find the freedom you’re looking for.
Learn How to Control Your Thoughts
Again, I’ll bring it back to meditation. I wrote about this a bit in Centering Yourself When You Feel Like You’re Spinning Out of Control, and again in You Become What You Think About. But meditation can be a wonderful training ground on how to master your thoughts.
Sitting in silence with your eyes closed can be a harrowing experience when done for extended periods of time. This is because your body and mind are so used to being active and moving, that being completely inactive and unmoving is unsettling.
However, the longer you can sit in meditation, the more control you have over your body and mind. It’s similar to working out. The longer you lift a certain weight, the easier it becomes to lift that weight over time. But just like working out, you can’t go to the heaviest weight if you haven’t trained your body and mind to lift that weight.
When meditating, it’s best to start slow. Start with an easy ten or twenty minutes a day for thirty days. Then increase your time by five to ten minutes, whatever you feel like you can handle.
During that time, stay present and aware of your body and your thoughts. If you find yourself caught up in a thought process, simply let it go and return to the stillness.
Slowly, ever so slowly, you will begin to stretch the amount of time between thoughts. You’ll become aware of when you’re thinking.
This will transition to your regular non-meditative life as well, so that you’re normal waking life will itself become meditative. Over time you will begin to catch the thoughts you no longer wish to think. You’ll shut them down and replace them with thoughts you do want to think.
Repeating this activity over and over will begin to train your mind to go in the direction you want it to go. You will start to find freedom in your life because you are becoming the master instead of the servant.
I hope you find this beneficial. As always, be sure to share this message with someone who needs to hear it. I wish you a fantastic day.
Much love to you all
Josiah
