As mentioned in my previous post, over the years I have realized that I'm a very emotional person. I tend to get caught up with feelings and let them dictate my behaviors. I saw this as "being in tune with myself". I always told myself because I am able to act on my emotions and how I feel in the moment I am being truthful to who I am and I am living a life of honesty and integrity. This had been the case for 25 years and I never questioned it once.
After 25 years of tumbling through the motions I started to realize that many of the things I've been doing and the "methods" of life that I adopted simply just weren't working for me. I was unhappy, ungrateful, and tired of everything that it was, my life. Upon that realization I eagerly looked for answers in any shape or form, I read a number of self help books and articles after articles regarding the psyche and human functions and stumbled upon something that made me challenge the idea of "being in tune with myself" for the last 25 years.
The idea was that we as humans are so often affected by our emotions and act upon them despite the consequences that it becomes an invisible shackle which ties us down and makes us suffer. Now, I'm overly simplifying things here in one condensed and not so well structured sentence. But the basic idea here is that we often are so "in tune" with how we "feel", that no matter how destructive this "feeling" may really be and how it may influence us to behave in a non beneficial way towards our lives, we will still stubbornly act upon it because we think we are doing the right thing. This made me think about all the decisions I've made in the past, some were good ones, but many were debilitating. Out of all the ones that hurt me and made me miserable, I continued to make them as time went on and repeated the pattern over and over again because I thought I was being "honest" to my "feelings" and being "in tune with myself". However, what I failed to realize is that emotions are directly linked to our ego, our egoic self wants to act on these emotions regardless of whether it is beneficial or debilitating. Because I acted on every single "feeling" that I had, they, the feelings, dictated my life and my being. I was not really in control of my life. I let my ego and emotions dictate my behaviors and did not filter based on whether the actions would propel my life in a positive and more wholesome direction. And in turn, many of those actions that I took, actually were terrible ones that ended up pushing me deeper and deeper into a hole of misery. I was bounded by my emotions and became a slave to my ego, all the while, thinking that I was "doing the right thing". This continues to feed my ego and thus letting it control more of my life and my being. It became a cycle of toxicity and self inflicted pain-bodies and I did not even realize it.
Now, being emotional isn't necessarily a bad thing. Having emotions and feeling them is human nature and there is no way we can avoid it all together. However, not all emotions need to be acted upon. Some are good ones that propel us to do things to better ourselves; while some, and I'm very familiar with these, are purely toxic and will influence us to create more negative feelings (thus a cycle continues). I think it's still very possible to be in tune with yourself without acting on every single feeling, instead of acting upon some, simply observe, know that it's there, and watch it pass by. By giving up a reaction to those negative feelings you regain control of yourself and your being, while still very much in touch with yourself. But instead of being bound by your emotions, you now gain ownership to them.
So yes, while I am a very emotional person and felt like I was "in tune with myself" all my life, truth is, I was just giving myself reasons and excuses to continue a toxic cycle that wasn't working. I now strive to be in tune with myself and also remind myself to realize when a negative feeling is urging me to create a toxic reaction. This requires constant discipline and awareness, something I'm not very familiar with. I know that this journey of self finding and pursuit of joy will take a lot of effort and presence, but I also know as with anything else, hard work will pay off in the end.
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