Continuing on my inward quest...

It has come to my attention that I want to be more connected or aware of my feelings and emotions. I believe in the past I may have suppessed my emotions for whatever reason. That has brought me to this point in my life where I feel that the next step in my growth is to reconnect with how I really feel on a daily basis and on important subjects in my life.

How can I reconnect with my true feelings on a daily basis? How can I be more aware of how I really feel on subject and not just put a happy face sticker over things?

Side note: For the past several years I've smoke weed on an almost daily basis. I believe this has supressed much of my connection with my emotions over the years. Could this be true? Could this habit be lowering my vibration? or putting a threshold on how high i can raise my vibration.

Thank you all.

asked 14 Jun '12, 11:22

Chris%202's gravatar image

Chris 2
2.5k11762

edited 14 Jun '12, 12:46

Jaianniah's gravatar image

Jaianniah
37.8k13129610

1

Good question Chris2 - I understand that you have made good progress since you asked it but just for others who read the question - there are some great exercises in The Path of Emotions by Dr Synthia Andrews.

(23 Mar '14, 06:24) Catherine
showing 0 of 1 show 1 more comments

The fastest way I know of to reconnect with your emotions is simply to meditate...because meditation helps reset your emotional sensitivity. See Is meditation a cure-all? for detailed information.

Because of this, a habit of daily meditation - no more than 10-15 minutes daily is required - is really helpful to keep you constantly aware of how you are really feeling on any subject.

With regard to the drug use, many people use drugs to numb themselves to bad feelings. In other words, they are not in a good feeling place and rather than mold their vibrational stance into a better-feeling place (most do not even know this is possible), they decide to take some action to kill the bad feeling instead...and that action is the usage of the drug.

It's like turning off a loudly bleeping smoke alarm in your house when it is burning down because the activated alarm is irritating you. Yes, you might have a pleasant silence when you disconnect the alarm but your house will still be burning down :)

So with that kind of consistent drug use to avoid bad feelings, yes, over time, it does suppress how you are really feeling (assuming you are not meditating either) because you can have a tendency to habituate to a bad-feeling state and that feeling of "bad" just feels normal...you have basically forgotten what feeling good feels like.

You can usually spot when this bad-feeling habituation has happened through what you are manifesting physically. If you consistently get things physically manifesting in your life that don't make you feel good, they can only have come as vibrational matches to dominant thoughts you have been thinking that make you feel similarly bad.

If you cannot see anything in your life that is making you feel bad (and you don't meditate regularly) then it is quite likely you have habituated to those bad feelings.

But I think that's easy to fix...probably even just a few days of daily meditation ( "resetting your vibration daily" ) will start to make those bad feelings stand out for you like a sore thumb :)

But because you'll then be back in touch with your emotions and you realize again how bad those feelings really are, you may then get tempted to go back to the drug use to numb them again.

To avoid this happening, it might be a good idea to embark on a simultaneous campaign of clearing up the underlying vibrational issues as the increased sensitivity from meditation draws the bad-feeling topics to your attention.

Hope that helps.

link

answered 14 Jun '12, 11:57

Stingray's gravatar image

Stingray
93.7k22143372

2

2 years later and this answer makes so much more sense to me now. Thanks again. :)

(17 Mar '14, 01:20) Chris 2

@Chris 2 - "2 years later" - You're welcome, Chris. Though since linear time is an illusion anyway ( How do we use "Wrong prong, bong gong" and the "Power to create worlds", past, present and future? ), your self from 2 years ago has now already understood it in the moment it was first posted :)

(22 Mar '14, 06:45) Stingray

Stingray gave you a splendid answer, and it is hard to add much to what he had to say. But I thought that I would throw in my two cents just to emphasize his points about the connection between feeling bad and the use of weed (or any drug). You may not have realized it when you started smoking way back when, but perhaps that is where you should begin in your quest to reconnect with your feelings.

I happen to know a few people who claim that weed is harmless and so on, but I guess I cannot agree, simply because weed can mask how you really feel, as you have discovered. It doesn't just mask the bad feelings, though- it also masks the good ones, too. You just go through life on this sort of mid-range numb hum, and after a while, it does take a toll. Nothing feels like much of anything at all. Perhaps the only thing that you do feel is the desire to be stoned, and that is a strange thing to want day after day.

I congratulate you on wanting to feel, though. It is a really, really good starting place to a much better life. It sounds like a contradiction, though, doesn't it? It is like I am saying, "Hey, yeah, bring on those bad feelings, boys!" But..to use Stingray's analogy...it would be better to stop the house from burning down than to just tinker with the smoke detector all day.

I cannot emphasize enough that you are stifling your good feelings as well as the bad. That is what will pull you through getting off the weed. You will have to work hard though. You will have days that tempt you beyond endurance...but when you discover the beauty of the Earth, the joy of being alive, the satisfaction of really being productive- then you will see that the weed was not your friend after all. It is not just numbing you to your feelings- it is numbing you to being alive!

I am glad you posted this question. It took courage, and I admire that. Use that courage to taper off the weed, and get back to life. +1 for being honest!

Blessings,

Jai

link

answered 14 Jun '12, 12:45

Jaianniah's gravatar image

Jaianniah
37.8k13129610

The "problem" with emotions is we are taught at a very early age to deny what triggers our emotions, and so we stop expressing them appropriately. Then these intense emotional experiences that do not get expressed appropriately remain "stuck" in our amygdala, waiting to be fired off in response to anything that even resembles the original experience. The problem is our natural ability to integrate our experience, both emotionally and thoughtfully, gets hijacked at a very early age, therefore it remains undeveloped. We tell someone when we are three years old that something hurts or that we are afraid or we ask our parent why he or she is angry and we are told that our perception and experience is totally off when, in fact, it is not. Some people go on to respond inappropriately in many situations, some people "shut down" emotionally.

So that is the beginning of the split between our emotions and our thinking. The problem is not the ego, it is the split between the thinking brain and the emotional brain. When we reintegrate our thinking brain with our emotional brain, our emotions will always serve us well, no matter how intense. We will also be able to distinguish between an appropriate response to what is actually happening in the moment, or if it's a "programmed" response left over from some programming in the past. This is how our brains are supposed to work, with us recognizing our emotional indicators correctly, and thinking the correct thoughts in response to our perceptions.

Prior to civilization, when we lived in hunter-gatherer societies, properly interpreting emotions and translating them to logical thought was crucial to survival. We had "coming-of age" rituals which were designed to guide us from childish emotional responses and thoughts into adult ones. When humans formed larger groups, our leaders found that keeping us in the dark was better suited to keeping us "under control." It's no wonder so many of us are lost.

But we can change that.

link

answered 25 Mar '14, 18:08

Beach%20Baby's gravatar image

Beach Baby
82018

edited 25 Mar '14, 18:10

Click here to create a free account

If you are seeing this message then the Inward Quest system has noticed that your web browser is behaving in an unusual way and is now blocking your active participation in this site for security reasons. As a result, among other things, you may find that you are unable to answer any questions or leave any comments. Unusual browser behavior is often caused by add-ons (ad-blocking, privacy etc) that interfere with the operation of our website. If you have installed these kinds of add-ons, we suggest you disable them for this website




Related Questions