An "understanding" is the master key to a life of happiness, ease, connection, and creativity. It's built around two simple truths, once realized and experienced, will begin transforming yourself and your life in moments of insight. This is not something to believe or disbelieve; the truth doesn't work that way. Gravity does not care if you believe it or not. What is true is a matter of opinion and perspective. The truth always is in the background waiting for you to discover it.
Truth One:
You are amazing. There is nothing wrong with you, and you do not need fixing, enhancing, or improving.
Truth Two:
You are always doing your best, given your thinking that looks real to you. But while “the world is what you think it is,” there’s a world beyond your thinking.
Yes, you, me, and everyone you know are being lied to. If anything needs fixing in the world, you must see yourself first for who you are. The instruction manual for the life we are offered daily in the news, schools, and at work is missing some pages, is written backward in most cases, and in languages designed to keep you in the dark and upset.
The true object of all human life is play. - G.K. Chesterton
All the 'choices,' options, and possibilities exist [only?] in some future, expected and hoped for. The present moment offers only now. There is a push and pull to stay out of now, to avoid being centered, and to keep your eye on tomorrow or the past. There is no tomorrow now, in the present moment. Operating in now simplifies everything you do.
The inside-out understanding tells me that my feelings and emotions [my 'experiences'] are telling me nothing about my life, nothing about the circumstances, and everything about the quality of my thinking. If the train of thought I'm on has signs of upset, anger, aggravation, disappointment, or any other so-called negative feeling or emotion, I need to stop and get off the train!
Love [joy, bliss, the present moment, now, happiness...] is not an emotion. Emotion, whatever 'feeling' that is there, comes from the thought you are currently thinking. Unhappy thoughts produce unhappy feelings. Anxious thoughts produce anxious feelings. If that is you thinking, think something new. If you cannot change your thinking, your thoughts, perhaps something other than 'you' is using you for some motive other than your own.
"Your thinking is a variable guide to reality, but your feelings are a foolproof guide to the quality of your current thinking.
Our guidance system lies not in analyzing our thoughts but in feeling our feelings. When we’re feeling expansive (warm, loving, spacious, comfortable, easy, well, etc.), that’s the shadow of healthy thinking, and our thoughts can, on the whole, be trusted. When we’re feeling contracted (insecure, apathetic, frustrated, numb, stressed out, uncomfortable, and so on), chances are that our thinking is unproductive, and whichever train of thought we might engage with will lead us somewhere we don’t really want to go." - Michael Neill
Do you have feelings, or do your feelings have you? Where do your feelings come from? What do you say your feelings are good for?