The Myth of “I Shouldn’t Feel This Way”

“Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be.” — Wayne Dyer

I catch myself, often, berating myself for experiencing negative emotions. I will suddenly find myself acutely irritated or lost in a memory of something that makes me angry, and I immediately try to push those feelings away. My resistance only compounds the issue, making the negative emotions stickier and more complex, leading me into a battle against myself. Whether I like it or not, the negative feeling exists right now as a current of energy in my body, manifesting as a sensation of tension, heat, or pain — it’s not what I want, but it’s already here, and hating it and pushing it away is, as Byron Katie would say, like arguing with a raindrop.

Recently I’ve discovered a non-combative space of awareness underneath whatever feelings waft through me. It’s a vastness that holds the negative emotion, my resistance to the negative emotion, all thoughts flying through my head, and my awareness of all this internal turbulence, all at the same time. When I mentally back up from the negative emotion I’m trying to wrestle to the ground, I find myself in this space of stability and awareness. My attention is no longer engaged with my feelings of fury or irritation, so there is no fuel for the flames. Space appears between “me” and the emotion that had just been masquerading as me, which allows the emotion to move instead of circling in on itself, becoming a typhoon.

So maybe, instead, I should feel this way. At least for right now.