This week’s question from our portal “Ask Us Anything” comes from Dana:
I’d like to better tune into what my desires actually are, and separate them out from my feelings. I know we’ve been talking about the idea that feelings aren’t real — that they’re programmed, they’re beliefs, things we learned. I’m looking inside and asking myself: what’s the difference between a desire and a feeling? How do I know that what’s coming up for me is desire, and not just feeling, or something else — so I can be aware of how to make decisions?
Happiness first. “I’m happy eating pizza” — right now you’re giving the power to the pizza. Pizza makes me happy. The idea would be that you create the things that you want in your life based on the goals that you have for yourself. You could lose weight and still eat pizza — you just can’t eat it every day.
As far as the feeling goes, the idea is to separate yourself from the effect of feeling. That feeling’s not happening to you — you’re choosing it. Here’s a great way to start doing this: pick a couple of movies that trigger you, I don’t care what they are, and sit down and watch them, marking every place in the movie where you’re triggered. Then, after the movie’s over, ask yourself: why was I triggered? What’s the story behind that? And then realize this — you can choose to feel any way you want about what you experienced.
When we’re born, we have just raw emotion. It’s not complex, it’s not nuanced — happy, sad, cold, hungry, tired. But what happens is parents start moving those feelings in a direction. They tell us how to feel about what we’re experiencing, they give us the meanings — and all three of those things get linked up together. So for the rest of your life, every time something around that story gets triggered, you have the meaning already embedded in your subconscious, the feeling, and the reaction. You can change all of it. All of it.
The first time I really had an awareness around this, I was driving home from work. Some guy cut me off, and I’m raging, cursing him out, the finger, all that stuff. I was just starting to study this, and I thought to myself, why am I acting that way? Where did that come from? And it became very obvious — that’s what my dad used to do. I asked myself a different question: am I really that upset about what this guy did? The answer was no. But the only outlet for reaction I had was what I was taught. So I had to give myself a different response cycle. You take it one thing at a time. As you experience it, ask yourself: why am I reacting this way? How would I like to react to this — without changing the circumstance, because you can’t control every circumstance in your life. You can only control how you react to it.
What I figured out, continuing down that road, was that I was looking for things to be angry about — because I didn’t understand my own anger, didn’t understand what it was about, didn’t know what to do with it. People who are chronically angry, their radar is always looking for something to be angry about, and then they have these explosive moments. That’s not who they are — that’s how they were taught to deal with their anger. Sadness is the same way. Depression, guilt, shame, jealousy, envy — same way. When you’re programmed that the core emotions are the response to life, you look for situational circumstances to express them through. The idea is, if you change it at the core, I’m not going to be that person anymore. You stop looking for things to make you angry.
