Cultivate a different relationship with your emotions.
Emotions are visitors, they come and go.
You could compare them to people that knock on your door.
You open the door and you meet a nice person and you have a pleasant chat.
Over time you cultivate a friendship with this person. And you invite them in.
That’s what we do with positive emotions.
Now imagine one day you open the door to an entity, something evil.
You slam the door shut because you’re afraid.
The next day is interesting.
You hope the nice person shows up, but you fear the entity might make an appearance.
(The entity being negative emotions).
And over time, we cultivate different relationships with the different emotions.
With the nice emotions we form a friendship.
And with the negative emotions we adopt a negative stance, an avoidance, to keep them out.
We embrace the positive and push away the negative.
Here’s the thing. Until you open the door to the negative (the entity) and invite them in, they’ll always be there.
Inviting them in doesn’t mean you’ll have a good time together, that’s not the aim.
It’s about the relationship.
You invite them in. You offer them a seat. And you listen to them.
And once you’ve listen to them they’ll probably walk out.
Cultivate a different relationship with your negative emotions! Rather than trying to reduce their intensity or occurrence.
Negativity will show up now and then, sooner, later, always.
It’s ok to feel it, and it’s important you do.
Take this first step, even a tiny opening of the door.
Otherwise the entity will keep standing there.
And you’ll fret about it knocking on the door. To a point where you start panicking. Turning off the lights, locking door and boarding it up.
You create a fear of fear. A cycle.
But when you take this first step. You’ll notice you’re no longer afraid of that feeling.
They’ll no longer hold you back from doing what you want to do. And what you need to do to improve your life.