Creating a Better Life

How do you describe your emotional state?

If you are angry, do you say “I am angry?”

Does depression automatically bring on “I’m depressed?”

The other day I listened to an interview with Hale Dwoskin, the creator of The Sedona Method, on the Boundless Living Challenge site.  One of the things that he mentioned was using “I feel” rather than “I am” to describe an emotional state a person is experiencing.

When we feel something, whether we call it positive or negative, all it really is is an experience - a moment in time where we’ve identified a single component of the myriad of things that are going on around us.

If we break our legs, we don’t say “I am broken” (while that may be somewhat accurate.)  We say “My leg is broken” or “I have a broken leg.”

So how about “My emotions are depressed” or “I have depression.”

Even better (at least for me) is the idea of just noticing - “There is depression.”

This completely separates my identity from the experience.  That way, I don’t have to fall into the trap of staying mired in the muck of the depression, but I can still acknowledge it is there.

I remember once asking a pastor of a Religious Science church about this… she had just given an outstanding talk on the power of the phrase I Am, but I couldn’t reconcile saying “I am Joy”  or “I am Wealth” when I was feeling depression.  Her advice was to just tell myself “I am Joy” regardless of what I was feeling.

Let’s just say that this didn’t resonate with me at the time.

I understood where she was coming from, but it was a little like (as Abraham-Hicks has said) putting a smiley face sticker over an empty gas gauge.

I needed to first disengage the depression from my identity before I could do anything about it, and recognizing that it was a passing emotion, one that could and would change if I would allow it to, and take the actions that would remove it.

Actions like moving, getting in the sun, meditating, eating something good for my body… simple little things that would allow that joy to rise.

Yes, there is a place for affirmations like “I am joy.”  But when they are used to simply mask what’s going on underneath, in my personal experience they can do more damage than help.

Back to that interview I listened to:

In it, Dworkin compared using affirmations and positive thinking to taking a barrel of rotten apples and putting a layer of fresh apples over the top of them.

Will the fresh apples make the rotten apples fresh?  Or will the rotten apples accelerate the decay of the fresh ones?  Obviously, unless something is done about the rotten apples beneath, all they will do is rot even more… and bring down the fresh ones right along with them.

We need to disengage the rotten apples from the fresh ones.

We don’t need to discuss the rottenness of the apples.

We don’t need to pretend that they don’t exist.

We probably want to take a look at just why the apples are rotten in the first place… but let’s remove them first, then discuss them.

“There are rotten apples. What can do to release them?”

What do you do to release your rotten apples?

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Features, emotions
affirmations, boundless living challenge, depression, Hale Dwoskin, release, Sedona Method