Just Feel Better

On this long upward climb to Love, remember, you do not have to make the leap from feeling awful to feeling great...just take the step up to feeling better. Make it your goal to just feel better one ladder rung at a time. That is the surest way to climb.
-me ...from something I wrote along the way

The Importance of Feeling Good

Oh man, the more I learn, the more I realize that the most important thing we can do in life is to work towards feeling good.  It is all about feeling good!  When we feel good we vibrate at a higher level and when we vibrate at a higher level we are in sync with the vibration of Life...what was intended for us. So what is the so called "secret" of life that people write and speak and create documentaries about?  Feeling Good!

Many of us know that.  Yet we find ourselves in life circumstances we don't want...we are caught in the lower energy emotions of fear, shame, despair and wonder how we are to get up to the level of vibration where all the great things happen. We set out with all the greatest intention to feel good!

Setting Ourselves up For Failure

We set ourselves up for failure, however, when we try to leap from a place of despair to a place of bliss.  So do not focus so much on feeling good...just better. Feel Better.

A Course in Miracles describes our life experience  being divided by two emotions:  Fear and Love.  Fear, of course, is low energy and Love is high energy. All the negative emotions are in the fear section all the positive are in the Love section. If I am in helpless despair...at the bottom of the Fear section where most of us spend too much of our lives and I hear that Bliss is at the top of the Love section...I am going to want to climb up.  My temptation is to get there as fast as I can but I need to remind myself in order to get there at all...I can only move up one step at a time. 

One step at a Time

So what is above the experience of helplessness and despair? Sadness maybe.  I once wrote a poem and in it I described sadness this way, "Something sweet can be found in sadness, a soft melancholy whisper that breathes life into a withering soul, filling the void where apathy once sat."  So despair is apathy and helplessness and sadness offers just a tinge of hope in amongst all that melancholy.  Not the greatest emotion but it is better.  So I reach for sadness.

How?

Well feeling is the energy that makes the world go around but thoughts are the energies that create feelings.  So in order to feel better we need to think better.  We change the thinking process ever so slightly to take us from a feeling of utter despair and helplessness to sadness. We practice with the thought until it "feels right"...until it is believable. Once there, we take a deep breath and feel the relief!

Relief. 

You know you are there when you feel a certain relief of the heaviness the lower energy held over you....doesn't have to be a tremendous amount of relief just enough for you to say, "I feel somewhat better."

Congratulations on your success...you are moving up!

Do we stay there?

Definitely not.  Reach for the next emotion which might be shame or guilt.  Then from there reach for anger and blame...Every climb from despair to sadness, shame to guilt, guilt to anger etc is going to offer a certain amount of relief.  Feel the relief with each step upward. When you get to frustration you are very close to the neutral point...the halfway point that divides the Love feelings from the fear feelings.  This emotion is acceptance.

Things are so much easier when you get to acceptance.  Relief comes so much quicker and the move up is faster.  Embrace the wonderful feeling of letting go of resistance that occurs in acceptance but then keep moving. Keep climbing until you get to where you want to be, where you are meant to be. ..at the top of that ladder.

We can get there but our focus should not be on feeling great...just better ...one emotion at a time.

References and recommended reads

ACIM (2007) A Course in Miracles: Combined volume: Third Edition. Mill Valley: Foundations for Inner Peace.

My book when it is published which won't be long now lol ( I am so optimistic because I think it is a great book with a lot of valuable learning to share.)