Taking responsibility for my emotions
Lately, I’ve been looking deeper into myself whenever I experience a negative emotion. Before, whenever I experienced a negative emotion, I would try to change something in the external world. I would try to change whatever I perceived was causing the negative emotion in me.
This is especially important in relationships. You can't change other people. So if someone else is causing a negative emotion in you and you try to change them, it's not going to end well.
Instead, if you look into yourself and ask, “Why am I experiencing this negative emotion?” You realize that it's really in your own control. There's something going on inside of you that is causing the negative emotion. It's either an attachment or an insecurity or a desire that you might have to let go of.
It takes work and it's hard, but if you can achieve it, you end up saving energy in the long run. Instead of having to spend all this energy changing the external world to make your emotions feel better, you can soften and let the external world do whatever it wants, while you remain unfazed, and then you have all this energy to change the world in ways that aren't just to make yourself feel better.
When I get angry, instead of taking my anger out on the world or trying to run away from what's making me angry or trying to change what's making me angry, I just pay attention to the anger itself. And I ask myself, “Why am I angry?” Even if what's making me angry doesn't change, “Do I still need to continue to be angry?” And that's when I realize I can just let it go.
It's not exactly easy. Just to let anger go. This is where learning more about my body has helped me. One method that's been helping me a lot with releasing my emotion is breathwork. I realized that I just need to breathe it out. It's similar to punching a pillow or running.
I think I read somewhere that emotion is just the body reacting to thoughts. This anger or this emotion is somewhere in your body and somehow by breathing or getting your blood pumping or flexing your muscles, you're able to get the emotion out of your body and then once it's out of your body, where does the emotion exist? It’s released to be digested by the universe and transmuted into other forms of energy.