Common and Recurring Set of Feelings

Our guest feelings tend to come with friends. Positive feelings of consolation tend to hang out with each other, most commonly the feeling of Love, tends to being Peace and Joy. Other common observations are Joy, Excitement and Happiness. Negative feelings are also commonly observed to come in a set, most commonly in the feelings of Anxiety, Stress and Anger.

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As we begin to be aware of the guests in our life, we also begin to realize that such set of guests tend to revisit our inner guest house time and again, and we repeat cycles of thoughts and actions as a result of their arrival. The unexamined soul may not be equipped to let them come with the full baggage of emotions, and to trash the guest house if need be, and allow them to leave.

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In this chapter, I practice in my guest house journaling or visualizing to observe for such common and recurring set of feelings to arrive, and to be present to them before allowing them to depart, and to seek the wisdom of their visit.

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The message from our inner wisdom

If you have experienced a recurring feeling, often a negative one, the inner wisdom is usually prompting you to look at your core beliefs and to see which belief or set of beliefs is in conflict with the event that just occurred. Allowing the messages to become sources of enlightenment is a powerful tool to work on the aspects of our self that we need to develop and grow. Just how do we receive the messages and learn to decipher the meaning behind the encrypted message?

Firstly, it is near impossible to receive a message if there is no reception. Feelings of consolation such as love, joy, playfulness, peace, gratefulness, satisfaction and hope are indicators of a strong wifi connection to receive messages. Being in a state where your disposition is open and curious allows the space between the negative feeling to widen and once that magnetic attraction is broken, you are free to be attracted to positive feelings. Positive feelings then help inspire more insights to the situation. I find that my flow state when journaling guest house experiences is when I have invited and conversed with the positive feelings in that scene. 

Next comes the message itself. How certain are we that this is what our inner voice wishes that we hear? I attended a good friend's wedding and learned a paradigm shifting lesson from what he taught me. At his wedding, a series of events did not play out according to the planned sequence and there were hiccups at the wedding banquet. He coolly remarked that nobody decides how the wedding is ran apart from the wedding couple, and if they decide to allow the plan to be altered, then that is also fine! They were the ultimate decision makers for that night and everything was happening to serve up the perfect wedding for them no matter what.

It is with this same perspective that we look at the possibilities life has to dish at us and we decide that we only have one life, and we get to choose how we assign a positive or negative value to any one particular event that arises. From this set of lenses, I would invite any message to first arrive in the inbox. Open it up and read it however you like to read it, but invite at least one feeling of consolation to be with you as you read out the message. See what comes up. You may wish to have that feeling read it out loud instead of you. 

Keeping a log in your journal of such recurring feelings helps us to understand the messages better. Remember that feelings are neither good nor bad, they are simply different forms of media, delivering a message usually out of love and done to protect and keep you safe. When we batch the guest house visualizations together in the journal, we may revisit these messages and contemplate on them collectively to see if there is a deeper meaning and purpose. It could also be that whatever concerns those feelings had, were not fully addressed. In any case, keep contemplating new guest house experiences until you are generally at peace even as these feelings arise again.

I still feel stress, anxious and angry or frustrated, especially when it relates to work. Over time I have learned to accept the message they deliver, which is to protect me from feeling unworthy, like a failure for not being able to meet the expectations of my bosses and my peers at work. Such feelings of unworthiness, of needing to do something in order to gain acceptance likely stems from a far deeper place of hurt, probably originating from my childhood. While I continue to work on understanding myself better, I am also more comfortable being in the presence of the infamous three, and I am also more present to my current external environment while my inner state is in temporary turmoil. Importantly, I have also learned to accept things as they are, and things as they go.