We've all been there. You pour your heart and soul into something, only for it to fall short of your expectations. It's easy to get stuck in feelings of defeat and self-pity. You think with all of evolution, there would be a basic workaround for this. But it is not an easy one.
Taking responsibility for our results is a simple concept, but it's not always easy to put into practice. When you take responsibility for your results, you shift your focus from blaming external factors to looking inward and examining your own thoughts, behaviours, and actions. This can be a humbling experience, but it's also incredibly empowering because you're not waiting for someone else to grant you permission to live your life.
The problem is that taking responsibility for our own emotions means that we're going to need to feel some of our negative emotions.
For most of us, the idea of sitting in our negativity may sound like the opposite of what we want to be doing. You may even feel like you're doing way too much of that already, and that's the problem. But in my experience, you just need to scratch the surface a little. And it turns out that what most people associate feeling a negative emotion is actually the feeling of resisting that emotion. We don't like feeling angry, guilty, embarrassed, lonely, etc. So we spend a large amount of every day. Trying to avoid these feelings. What that leads to is just not feeling safe (because your body keeps yelling that you're not listening). And we're exhausted the whole time.
Because it feels dreadful, we try our best to escape it as soon as possible. The problem is when you try and ignore your emotions. (That could be with Netflix, wine or overworking) Your brain panics and thinks something serious must be afoot, so it makes the message louder and larger. I wonder if there is a way to reframe these actions or behaviours simply as listening. Rather than trying to escape our negative emotions, we practised sitting with them for a while and seeing what comes up for us.
When you begin to take responsibility for your emotions, you begin to take responsibility for yourself and your life. When we finally stop resisting, we remember what it feels like to come home to ourselves and finally feel safe
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