Negative Emotional Judgments

Negative Emotional Judgments

So, have you become an expert relaxer yet? Can you soften your muscles on command? Can you quiet your thoughts? Shift your feelings from ick to nice?

Learning these skills takes us a long way toward being happy.

In my twenties I was diagnosed with acute chronic nervous tension. Basically, what that meant was that my neck wouldn’t move. My shoulders were like stone. I was not a happy camper.

The good news was that I got to participate in the first US study of biofeedback at the Mayo Clinic. That may have been the beginning of my love affair with woo woo healing stuff. My always-freezing hands and feet warmed up. My frozen neck loosened, my shoulders softened. All by changing my thoughts. Freaking weird. Especially for the Mayo Clinic.

It was around that time that I made the decision to become a happy person. I have traveled a long and interesting road, with a lot of detours into a lot of dark places since I made that choice. I don’t live in a happy place all the time, but I will say that my worst day these days is better than my best days back then.

Why do I choose to be happy? What makes me relax? Why do things go smoothly for me?

As we make our tiny choices all day long, one of the beliefs we may smack into is the idea that life is hard. It’s not true. I know that’s a wacky notion. I know it may be challenging to get our heads wrapped around it, but it’s not true. It’s a mislearning, and we’ve been reinforcing that lie our whole lives. Everywhere we look, it’s being reinforced. Advertisers rely on it, the news banks on it, insurance companies make millions off it.

What is true is that we make negative emotional judgments about stuff. Stuff is neutral until we put a judgment on it. I can usually tell when I’m in that negative emotional judgment mode because I feel bad.I get there when I’ve forgotten that the Universe gives me opportunities, not problems. The instant I call something a problem, I’ve put an NEJ on it. The same with the words trouble and difficulties. On the one hand, it’s just semantics, on the other hand, it’s an emotional set-up for suffering.

NEJs make us tired. They cannibalIze our good feelings, and then, when they’ve devoured our good feelings, they start in on our physical well being. NEJ consume our sleep so we wake up feeling agitated and worried and can’t seem to shut off our churning minds.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying stuff will never happen that we feel sad, or scared, or angry about. All I’m saying is that NEJs will make any situation worse. When we lose a loved one, for example, we will have feelings about that. Sorrow, grief, anger, and so on. That’s how we do it. Loss does stuff to us. When we take some time to identify our NEJs and let them go, the feelings get clean, and we can experience them with ease, and sometimes even a kind of enjoyment for the purity and power of the moment.

Life isn’t hard, I make my life hard. When I get me stuck in a bad thought place, I may need your help to get out. You do that for me. I really appreciate it. I hope I return the favor, and that the more we practice it, the less and less often we will go there. I do love that.

How have I changed from believing life is hard to knowing I have choices?

(c) Pam Guthrie all rights reserved 02042014