Emotional Treasures

 

Our deepestfears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasures. —Maria Raine Rilke

Lifegives us emotionalchallenges, and no oneis exempt. Rich or poor, we all have the challenges of feeling painful emotions such as frustration, disappointment, grief, hurt, fear, anger, sadness, jealousy and envy to name a few. As Istated earlier, the words and deeds of the authority figures from our childhood, primarily those who parented us, are now the beliefs we hold in our conscious and unconscious mind. Our beliefs are what transform into emotions, and our emotions are what transform into behavior.

A painful emotion is a signal, letting us know that we are mistakenly holding a false belief and that we need to correct it. Emotions are a ringing bell, a gift of awareness that provides us with he opportunity to correct our mistaken beliefs and take us closer to experiencing oneness with our spirit self.

Unfortunately, our judgmental and mistaken inner voice tends to speak with the voice of authority as though it were speaking the truth… with a capitalT! Even though itspeaks authoritatively, do not believe it! Your power comes from questioning that authoritative voice. Ask it how it knows this ―truth‖ about you, and youwillsee how little knowledge it has to back up its claims.

Next, realize how old you were when you determined those beliefs. Notice how believing what you believed at that time served you so that you could feel loved and cared for, safe and secure, and therefore able to focus on the important task of growing up. Realize that everything you have done in your life was done with the intention ofself-care and self-love. You have never, never been self-sabotaging. You are love, so there is nothing you have done or could have done that was not motivated by self-love. Even people who are mentally ill and hurt themselves or others act from an intention ofselflove. Suicide is often the desperate act of someone trying to ease overwhelming pain and fear when no other option was conceivable to them.

When we identify with the beliefs that make up our personality self, we think, feel and behave according to the standards of those beliefs. For example, a story about an indigenous tribe reports that when one of their tribe members breaks the law, he orshe is brought into the center of the village to face all of the other tribe members. One by one, each member of the tribe tells the wrongdoer all of the good qualities they know about him or her. This unusual tribe actually understands criminal psychology. When we truly believe we are bad, we will behave badly, and we will demonstrate goodness when we believe we are good. Our actions follow our emotions, and our emotions follow our beliefs.

It is a fact that the belief that is causing your pain is an incorrect or inaccurate belief. You might want to argue this point if you sincerely believe you are not good enough, or even believe that you are bad, because of this reason or that. The truth isthat, no matter what you’ve donewrong orwhat you didn’t or couldn’t do, you are and you have always been much more than good enough!