Do you wish you had a remote control that could change your frame of mind on demand? Do you ask yourself why, at times, you can’t fully live in the present moment?
Every so often, I wish I had an emotional remote control that allowed me to control time. I would rewind to the happy moments and pause through them to prolong the experience for a while. I would zip through sad ones and delete them as they come. Unfortunately, in real life things are not as simple! My best time machine is my memory of them!!
Despite the ephemeral nature of time, I am awestruck by the eternal nature of our emotions. I find that the memory of the ecstatic moment is shortly lived compared to the memory of a sorrowful one. We get distraught with a painful trauma or loss and at times, its memory endlessly sticks to us!!!
The reason why we are not always in the present is because we are triggered by a past emotion or preoccupied by a future one based on our previous experience.
When happiness and sadness are generated by the present moment, it is advisable to experience them fully without suppressing them. When we go through a crisis, being sad and grieving our loss is normal. Allowing our feelings to surface and getting in touch with them is so important. If we override the negative emotions, they will manage to resurface like a buoy we are trying to push down in the water. At times, the pain is unbearable but by living through it, it will move through us.
Once the grief process has passed, holding on to these feelings of pain and sadness could affect our state of being.
These emotions are energy in motion. So how could we have power over them? Could we really be happy or sad on demand??
When the emotion we are feeling in the present is generated by a past painful experience that was dealt with, we have the power to shift it. Before we do so, it is important to:
- Define if what has occurred in our life pertains to the past. If we are going through a tragedy that happened a month ago, this past is still present. It is important to allow ourselves the time we need to heal at our own pace and not rely on our emotional remote control to fast-forward through them too quickly.
- Acknowledge whether we dealt with our feelings at the time of tragedy. If not, we can always go back in time and try to identify our emotional logo as described in the first step of The Dolphin’s Dance.
Discovering our emotional logo is the first step to allowing us to isolate the emotion from our experience. We can then cultivate our capacity to shift our sadness, anger and sorrow if we so choose.
On the other hand, by trying to remember our happy moments many times a day, we can create a neutral pathway to happiness. Indeed, the memory of the joyful emotion could alter our mood of the day in a very positive way.
With Conscious Awareness, if sadness is a snapshot of a remembered past reality, we could have the power to flip our emotional state of being like a dolphin’s flip!!
So, could our emotional logo become our emotional remote control??
