You Are Not Your Feelings

You are not your feelings.

People wrongly identify with their feelings. They feel anxious, so they tell themselves a story, ‘I’m anxious, I have anxiety.’ This leads to living a life in which we’re trying to avoid certain feelings or chasing others.

We reach a state of calm. Then we start to think about how to hold on to it. How to stay in this state forever. Then the calm is gone and we’re anxious again.

Understand: Your feelings are impermanent. You are meant to feel. Emotions exist so that we can feel them, the full range. Happy, sad, bored, discontent.

Stop thinking about your feelings as a permanent state and realize you have the power to change it.

When you think of Mike Tyson, ‘Iron Mike,’ ‘The Baddest Man on the Planet.’ A career record of 50-6, 44 knockouts, arrested more than 30 times before he was 13. You don’t think of someone who felt a lot of fear.

It’s hard to imagine him in tears before a fight. Pacing around outside crying and overcome by anxiety and fear. Tyson’s trainer and adopted father, Cus D’Amato would say, “The hero and the coward both feel the same thing, but the hero uses his fear.”

Tyson felt fear, it was a feeling he had. But then he moved forward. After those tears is a fight that was stopped in his favor after about 35 seconds. Thoughts, emotions, feelings. They’re like clouds, they come and go. Not here forever. Not gone forever.

In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts explains that if, “we are to be fully human and fully alive and aware, it seems that we must be willing to suffer for our pleasures.”

If you never want to feel sad. You’ll never feel happy. If you never want to feel anxious, you won’t know contentment. If you’ve never had a bad day, you won’t recognize a great one. The alternative to feeling is numbness. It’s bland, mediocre and average. It’s half alive.  

You can’t control your feelings, but you can control how you react to them. Accept that your feelings are impermanent. They come and go. They’re feelings, not a life sentence.