Next, close your eyes and think about how you feel when you experience
that particular emotion. If you can observe yourself overcome by that emotion,
pay attention to how it feels in your body. There are different sensations that
correlate to different emotions. I want you to become aware of all of those
physical signs. Do you become hot, irritated, jittery, weak, flushed, deflated,
tight? Scan your body with your mind and notice in what area you feel that
emotion. (If you do not feel anything in your body, that’s okay; just remember
what you want to change about yourself. Your observation is changing it
moment by moment.)
Now, become familiar with your body’s present state. Does your breathing
change? Do you feel impatient? Are you physically in pain, and if so, if that
pain had an emotion, what would it be? Just notice what physiologically is
happening in the moment and don’t try to run from it. Be with it. The host of
different feelings in your body becomes an emotion when you name it as anger,
fear, sadness, or whatever the case may be. So let’s get down to all of those
feelings and physical sensations that create the emotion you want to
unmemorize.
Allow yourself to feel that emotion without being distracted by anything or
anyone. Don’t do anything or try to make it go away. Almost everything you
have done in your life has been to run from this feeling. You used everything
outside of you to try to make it go away. Be present with your emotion and feel
it as energy in your body.
This emotion has motivated you to appropriate everything you know in your
environment to fashion an identity. Because of this feeling, you created an ideal
for the world instead of an ideal for yourself.
This feeling is who you really are. Acknowledge it. It is one of the many
masks of your personality that you have memorized. It started from an
emotional reaction to an event in your life, which lingered into a mood, which
developed into a temperament, which created your personality. This emotion
has become the memory of yourself. It speaks nothing about your future. Your
attachment to it means that you are mentally and physically bound by your
past.
If emotions are the end product of experiences, then by embracing the same
emotion every day, the body is being fooled into believing that your external
world is staying the same. And if your body is being conditioned to
reexperience the same circumstances in your environment, you can never
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