Transcend Your Small Self
How do you handle the vicissitudes of ordinary life, with its losses, disappointments, stresses, and crises? Have you heard about the mechanism of surrender?
Are you able to let go consciously…where you are in charge how you feel, and you are no longer at the mercy of the world?
We tend to accumulate huge amount of negative feelings, attitudes, and beliefs over a lifetime. We seek to escape from them in different ways, because we don’t know how to handle these feelings. Thoughts in and of themselves are painless, but not the feelings that underlie them. One feeling can create thousands of thoughts. Look at all the years of thoughts associated with one painful memory from your past. When we surrender the underlying painful feeling, all of those thoughts disappear instantly, and the experience of an event fizzles out.
When we relinquish a negative feeling, we create space for creativity and spontaneity to manifest. We feel better. Even our body’s physiology like skin color, breathing, pulse, muscle tension, improves. In this state of inner freedom all bodily functions move in the general direction of normalcy and health. Our perception of the world and ourselves where we feel happier, peaceful and at ease is by far more attractive.
What we are feeling is merely the letting out of the inner pressure of repressed emotions. It is these repressed feelings that often make us susceptible to external stress.
Would you agree that the true source of stress is within us?
Our inner fears, resentments, and guilt are easily triggered by an external stimulus. To the fearful person, the world is a terrifying place. We tend to focus on what we have repressed within ourselves. Because of social conditioning in our society, we can even suppress positive feelings like love, fear of loss. Essentially, what we are holding inside colors our world.
External events only trigger what we have been holding down, both consciously and unconsciously. Not only the energy of our blocked feelings can lead to disease processes, it also narrows our vision both physically and mentally. The damage caused by stress is merely the result of our own emotions.
How about removing the cause of the stress itself instead of enrolling in the endless stress-reduction programs, which are merely relieving the after-effects of stress?
Look within and try to find the source of the underlying tension, which could be suppressed anger, guilt, or fear. Become aware of them and stay with them. Let them present without wanting to do anything about them. Instead, focus on letting out the energy behind them. Simply allow yourself to have the feeling without resisting it, venting it, fearing it or analyzing it. Avoid the thoughts, they are endless and self-reinforcing. Try to see it as just a “feeling”, and notice how the energy behind it dissipates. Don’t you feel lighter and happier?
Recognize that you are not your feelings, you are merely witnessing them. You are the witness of your feelings.
While reading this, try to leave behind your skepticism. Observe how willing you are to let go of your resistance to this process. Look at the fear behind the resistance. What are you afraid of? Keep letting go of every fear as it arises. Of course, your ego will do its best to trick you into believing that the technique is not working and things are still the same. This means that your ego is losing its ground in preventing you from experiencing what is really going on. Thoughts can obscure the truth. Quiet mind lets us function with effortless clarity. Sometimes you will feel stuck with a particular feeling. Simply surrender to the feeling of being stuck. Just let it be there and don’t resist it. If it doesn’t disappear, see if you can let go of the feeling in bits and pieces.