This Is How You Rewrite Your Story
To really feel happiness, we have to allow it to ourselves first
Naturally, happiness and peace are the top emotions that we strive for. But how often do we really “feel” happiness and peace when we are experiencing it, really experiencing it. How long until you start to fear that this is too good to be true and start to unconsciously sabotage it?
This would remind me of the instance when I received generous compensation from my boss. You would think that I was elated about it. But quite the opposite actually.
I became uneasy and if I’m being honest, terrified about it.
I’m practically near to telling my boss to take it back. Crazy I know. But when you’re like me who is so used to penny-pinching and just trying to make meet ends, it’s pretty overwhelming when you start to receive more than what you think you deserve.
And somehow this is how I learned how much I conditioned myself to scarcity, unworthiness, and smallness I have no idea how to let myself feel otherwise.
We have to understand that to really feel happiness, we have to allow ourselves it first.
What I’m learning was that the things that make us uncomfortable, especially if they are innately good, are not the problem.
The problem is our outdated narratives.
It’s the voice in our head telling we don’t deserve it, or the one who is so used in smallness, it has forgotten to take space. We have to understand that to really feel happiness, we have to allow ourselves it first.
Truth is just like how we have a certain tolerance for pain, we have a self-built tolerance for happiness too.
This is the amount of happiness that we’d allow ourselves to feel, in research this is called our ‘baseline’.
When we have spent a reasonable amount of our life having sporadic engagement in feeling peace, love, or being cared for, this becomes our baseline. We now associate those feelings with elusiveness because it is what we are used to.
For trauma survivors this could be so severe that even they are consciously aware of the toxic behavior, thinking, relationships that they have been removed from, they go back to it simply because it is what they are comfortable with.
It would be shocking to hear that happiness is not really what we after but comfort.
We crafted an imaginary scale that goodness should have equal pain.
Baseline was also created from the ingrained idea that happiness is preceded by future disappointments. That in letting ourselves feel good, we similarly make ourselves vulnerable to pain.
We crafted an imaginary scale that goodness should have equal pain.
This not only proof of our mind’s negativity bias but is dangerously self-fulfilling. In a sense, whatever we firmly accept to be true is what we would subconsciously manifest in our life.
To stop sabotaging our own happiness we need to be simply aware of it, and start the work from here.
Practicing self-compassion and reminding ourselves that we deserve love, kindness, abundance, and peace.
Begin in simple ways like accepting genuine praises rather than downplaying it.
Giving yourself those “me time” rather than another hour of over-time, and not feel guilty about it.
Sometimes it would come in the form of having the courage to ask for that raise because you know you merit it.
It is ending a relationship that you know is holding you back rather than inspiring you to grow.
Its taking full deep breaths and taking up space, because you now know that smallness is not part of you.
This is how you rewrite who you are and become the person that you ought to be.
Letting the waves of its rise and crash, simply witnessing it, we rob off its power to control us.
For all this reminder, is not to say that sadness is an emotion that we should shun. Thinking that you could live your whole life not feeling it, is not only a delusion but a recipe for suffering.
But in letting the waves of its rise and crash, simply witnessing it, we rob off its power to control us. Keeping in mind that nothing is permanent should enable us to gently allow them to come and go at their own pace.
After all, without sorrow how can we ever be aware of what bliss is?
Without the dark of the night, how can we appreciate the birth of a new dawn?
Thank you for reading!
I write at Her Sea Waves, a curation of my poetry works.
