Caught up in our emotions

When we are caught up in our emotions, it's as though they wash over us like a powerful wave and before we know it we find ourselves caught in a current. It's a current of deep waters we don't want to be in, struggling to stay afloat and not be taken under by. In the case of our emotions it's a current we don't want to be taken over by. Take anger for example; anger is easy to be swept up by and it is the path of least resistance. Water takes the path of least resistance and I believe emotions do to.

How many times do we find ourselves going along our merry way when bam, we are side swiped by something and we find ourselves saying and doing things we later regret because we were over taken by strong emotions. In the powerful wave of our emotions, everything 'feels' so real. And yet later when the emotions subside we are often able to see that things were not as real as they appeared under the influence of that powerful emotion.

I think we often feel that we are our emotions and from this perspective; if we are our emotions and our emotions are in pain, then it would seem to reason that the fight or flight response would take over thinking that we are in danger from the thing that is causing our emotions to feel this way. In this perspective it would be easy to see why we are often carried away by our powerful emotions and why they elicit such strong responses from us.

But what if we are not our emotions? What if we are something more important that has more control and a choice in how to respond to the emotions we feel? Oprah Winfrey in her studies with Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra says, "We are the awareness behind our emotions."

What is our awareness, but our spirit. From the perspective that we feel that we are our emotions, it is easy to be carried away by our emotions and over taken by them. But if we make a change to a new perspective that we are not our emotions, but we are the spirit that is experiencing and witnessing these emotions, we no longer have to respond with the knee jerk response of fight or flight. If we are not our emotions and we do not have to respond as though we are in danger, how we choose to respond becomes a choice instead of a reaction. When we have a choice, we are free.

When we are free, our feelings no longer feel overwhelming; they become joyful and enrich our lives. They become the color of our world, brightening and enlivening it. They turn relationships into experiences that grow and mature us. We are not our feelings, we are the spirit that God created and as such we choose our feelings, they do not choose us.