Colder Colder Warmer Warmer Hot!

Colder, Colder, Warmer, Warmer, Hot!

Feeeelings, nothing more than feeeeelings.   In the days of my youth, I thought emotions were stupid. I hated having feelings because most of the ones I had sucked. (I was a pretty negative girl back in the day.) It seemed to me that the whole idea blew, and I wondered a lot what good they were, and why we were saddled with them.

Now I know.

Emotions are your system’s GPS. Emotions let you know, if you are paying attention, where you are relative to where you want to be. They let you know how things are going, how you are doing.

You might say it’s like the kids’ game where you say, “colder, colder, warmer, warmer, hot!” as people either approach or recede from the selected target.

The worse I feel, the farther away from my natural life I am.

Now, when I was a callow girl, I had several things going against me. The big one was that I didn’t have a clue what I wanted, although I had a long list of what I didn’t want.

Not taking some time every so often to think about what you do want, which direction you want to be going, how you want to get there, is kind of like getting in your car and just driving aimlessly. It may be interesting, and I have really enjoyed doing that from time to time, but you don’t ever get where you’re going if you don’t have a destination in mind.          

Same with your day to day stuff.

And here’s the catch:  If you don’t decide what you want, if you don’t choose a direction, your system reads that as instructions to make it worse. I know, it’s annoying as heck, but that’s what happens; if you don’t evolve, you devolve.

Most of us are born with all the stuff we need to live wonderful lives. Each of us has to find our way to get there. It’s the point. We have our minds, we have our emotions. We have our physical bodies, and our spirits. We learn stuff, we mis-learn stuff. We correct the mis-learnings, and things get nicer. We don’t put effort in to get there, to our natural life, and our systems will work together to make us more and more uncomfortable and unhappy, until we hit bottom.

Hitting bottom is your “enough’s enough” point. It’s when you say, “I hate this, I am not going to live like this any more,” and do what it takes to make your life nice. For many of us, that point isn’t very dramatic, or we grew up with people who taught us to strive and thrive. But for the rest of us, our bottoms can be pretty awful. And until we decide, it’s somehow seems normal.
My normal was chronic pain, chronic depression, chronic insomnia, chronic abuse, chronic suicidal thoughts. I’m serious. Compared to that, my normal now is like some sort of animated cartoon with a grinning sun, and little fat birdies singing a happy song in a fragrant meadow with dancing flowers, only real.

How have I changed from ignoring my emotions to using my internal GPS?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 020713