IF WE CAN ONLY FEEL WHAT WE’RE THINKING, DON’T WE NEED TO THINK POSITIVELY TO FEEL THAT WAY?
“We are ever only one thought away from peace, love, and joy — which come from a state of no
thought.”
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There is a caveat that I haven’t mentioned yet to the principle that we can only feel what we’re thinking. The more accurate way of describing it is that we can only ever feel negative emotions when we are thinking.
The goal isn’t necessarily to completely stop feeling negative emotions. Some of the negative emotions can be helpful, such as feeling fearful when deciding to walk down a dark alley alone with no one else in sight.
These negative emotions are only helpful to us in terms of survival, but if we don’t constantly encounter life or death
situations, negative emotions are more unhelpful than helpful for most of us.
We’re going to be moving forward with the context that we’re not struggling for physical survival, so we’ll be using the context that negative emotions are not necessary most of the time.
When I mention that we can only ever feel what we’re thinking, most people assume that we must think positive to feel positive emotions.
Instead of convincing you if this is true or not, let’s do another thought experiment so you can experience the truth for yourself.
Recall a time when you felt the most joy and love you’ve ever felt in your life and feel the feelings that you felt at that time as much as you can for at least 30 seconds.
What kinds of thoughts were going through your mind at that peak moment when you felt the most joy and love? (I’m not asking what you were doing at the time, but what thoughts were going through your head at that exact moment.)
For many people that answer this, they realize that they didn’t have any thoughts during that exact moment. For others, they say that the thought was that they were so grateful or happy.
For those that answered that they had the thought that they were grateful, did you feel that joy and love before you had that thought or after?
Take 10-15 seconds to answer that question before moving on.
What insights and epiphanies did you have?
What’s crazy is that most people didn’t have any thoughts going through their mind when they felt the happiest and the most amount of love in their lives. For those that had the thought that they were grateful, they felt that way before having that thought.
If they had that thought, it happened after they felt the feelings, so the thought could not have produced the feeling.
This brings us to another truth: you do not have to have thoughts or think to feel positive emotions.
The beautiful part about truth is that it needs no justification because it can be experienced right here right now. It doesn’t need to be proven or rationalized to you and you experienced this truth firsthand by the experiment we just did.
Here’s why we don’t need to have thoughts or think to feel positive emotions like joy and love.
Our natural state of being IS joy, love, ecstasy, freedom, and gratitude. This may be hard to believe because if it’s natural, why don’t we feel that way all the time? I’ll answer this in a bit.
If we want to see the natural state of anything, one of the best ways is to look at nature and the state of it in its infancy (before it is a9ected and conditioned by its environment).
For example, let’s look at the natural state of a baby. What is a baby’s natural and default state (assuming the baby wasn’t abused, neglected, or had any physical issues)? Are babies naturally stressed, anxious, fearful, and self-conscious? Or are they naturally in a state of bliss, happiness, and love?
Our natural state of being is joy, love, and peace. Therefore, any thinking that we do will only take us away from those natural states of being, which is why whenever we feel extremely stressed, we are having a LOT of thinking going on. The strength of the negative emotion we feel is in direct proportion to how much thinking we are doing in the moment.
On the other hand, the intensity of the positive emotion we feel is inversely proportional to the amount of thinking we are doing in the moment. In other words, the less thinking we have going on, the stronger the positive emotion we feel in the present.
To see the truth in this, recall a few other memories you had when you were extremely stressed and anxious and see how much thinking was going on at the time.
Take about 1-2 minutes to do this.
Then recall a few memories where you were at your happiest or felt the most joy and love and see how much thinking you had going on at that time.
Take another 1-2 minutes to do this before moving on to really experience and internalize the truth of what you see.
An analogy that my coach taught me that helped crystallize this concept was to imagine our mind has a speedometer (like in a car), but instead of miles per hour, it is thoughts per minute. The more thinking we have going on, the higher the “thought-o-meter” goes, and if we have enough thinking going on, it’ll go into the red zone. This is when we feel extremely stressed, burned out, frustrated, and angry.
It is not the content of our thinking that causes us stress, but that we are thinking, period. The amount of thinking we have
going on is directly correlated to the magnitude of stress and negative emotions we are experiencing at any given moment. When you’re experiencing a lot of frustration, stress, anxiety, or any negative emotions, just know that it is because you’re thinking, and the intensity of those emotions is directly correlated to how much thinking is going on.
Therefore, it’s not WHAT we’re thinking about that is causing us suffering, but THAT we are thinking.
To summarize, we do not have to try to “think positive” to experience love, joy, bliss, and any positive emotions we want because it is our natural state to feel those emotions. The only times we don’t naturally feel these emotions is when we begin to think about the thoughts we’re having, thus blocking the direct connection to Infinite Intelligence and we feel stressed, anxious, depressed, and fearful. It is not about the content of our thinking, but that we’re thinking, which is the root cause of our su9ering. The intensity of the negative emotions is directly correlated to the amount of thinking we have going on in the present. The less thinking we have, the more space we create for positive emotions to naturally surface.
