Controling How I Feel

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Every action we take is first filtered through our feelings. How we feel about something will always be determined or affect what we do and how we do it. ~Helmstetter

I am certain that what I do, or fail to do determines how I feel. If I do this [whatever this is]I am happy. If I don’t do that [whatever that is] I will be sad. Using this definition shopping is a feeling. Eating is a feeling. In reality, what we do has little effect on how we feel. The truth is that it goes the other way around: What we feel determines what we do.

This would imply that if we want to act differently and do different stuff, then we need to change how we feel, but how do you change how you feel? Other people and circumstances make me feel what I feel. Don't they? Aren’t feelings just there? Don’t feelings come and go at will? It’s impossible for us to control our feelings, isn’t it? I mean, you can’t put a leash on feelings. Feelings respond to what has happened. If we bounce a check, get fired, or the dog dies, we feel whatever we feel and the control of those feelings is out of reach.

If I tell someone that we are in total control of our feelings, all I get are arguments. Hell, I argue with myself when I hear myself say it. What almost everyone believes is that we have these psychological buttons and other folk can just punch our buttons and we feel anger, or fear, or whatever, and these feelings exist because those buttons were punched. We think, “if they hadn’t said this, or done that, I wouldn’t feel like something-greasy-on-a-stick right now.”

If this is true, if there are these psycho buttons that control our feelings, we are still responsible for our feelings, because we allow other folk to punch those buttons.

What most of us think is that something is said or done [a stimulus] and that automatically triggers a corresponding feeling [a response] and we have no more control over that than the 8-ball has control when it is hit by the Q-ball.

But we are not a game of billiards. We may be impacted by what other people do or say, and our collision with their words or actions may hit us hard, yet we are still responsible for what we feel.

A divorce can make some people go into a tail-spin that lasts the rest of their life. Yet a divorce can be the beginning of an exciting new life for another. Similar actions or words from folk can have vastly different feeling responses on the part of the person being hit by those words or actions.

You can give a number of people the same stimulus, and they will have different emotional responses, or the same person may have different emotional responses to the same stimulus on different occasions. We are not pool balls and we do not have to go an a particular direction when the Q-ball of life hits us. In other words, other people can do or say things that give us a pretty strong invitation to feel something, but they are not in charge of how we respond.

. . . circumstances have little to do with happiness. It is also widely believed that we would be happier if we had fewer problems, or that once the problem we are immediately facing is resolved, happiness will result. It is possible to establish a problem-free life for any significant length of time. Buddhism says, NO. ~Woody Hoschswender