The Key to Understanding Feelings

The Key to Understanding Feelings by Lynne Hoft and Vivian Hildebrandt

When you feel hurt disappointed, burned-out or used, would it help you to know that your thoughts created those feelings.

The simplest way to change your feelings is to change your thoughts. This article provides a little known key to understanding feelings.

To become aware of our feelings, we need to know that they always follow thought. Once we truly understand this, we can develop a new relationship with them.

When we think of a lemon, we automatically salivate, and maybe even pucker; this is a physiological response. In the same way, every time we have a thought we have an emotional response.

Our responses often are conditioned through our experiences and training. These emotional patterns are easily triggered.

When we believe that feelings come first, that they happen to us, then we are powerless and at their mercy.

Road rage, domestic violence, people exploding at a salesclerk over having to wait a turn, and parents yelling at their kids in public exemplify out-of-control emotions.

Had the people involved understood that they could choose which thoughts to focus on and thereby the feelings they experience, none of these events would have happened.

The thinking that promotes hurt feelings comes from our patterns and programming; it comes out of stored past experience or fear. It's the ingrained expectation of how things should be, the fear of being seen as a bad parent, the belief that we have to do all things and be all things beyond what's humanly possible.

This is computer-mode thinking, in which we frantically search our files of experience for answers to current situations, hoping for new outcomes. The computer mind holds no new answers; it can only offer a repeat performance.

When we're seeking a new level of experience, we need to move to a new level of thinking. We need to shift to the transmitter mind, our natural brilliance. Everything we need to know to create more harmonious lives is available to us there.

Our brilliance gives us understanding that leads to patience with other drivers on the road. It gives us insight that leads to seeing ourselves and others with acceptance. We can be at peace while waiting in long lines. We can be kindhearted and loving with our children even when we're tired and stretched.

In any situation, we have access to a new understanding. We can stop for a moment, refocus our thinking, and relax into a new level of peace and well-being. By rethinking from our natural brilliance, we create harmonious feelings. By choosing a higher order of thinking, we choose happier lives