The fastest route to success and fulfillment

Do you ever feel stuck, frustrated, down, disheartened and depressed or, more simply put, like rubbish about life?

Would you believe me if I told you that, these feelings are, in fact, vitally useful and important if you understand their purpose and power?

Focusing on thoughts that feel better

The truth is that to find the fastest route to happiness, success and fulfilment in life, all you need to do is practice noticing how your thoughts feel to you emotionally. If they feel bad, find and focus on thoughts that feel better to you. That’s it.

Ancient wisdom

Let me assure you that I felt dubious about it when I first heard this idea. It sounds like a huge oversimplification. But I didn’t just make it this stuff up. This idea can be found in many of the world’s most revered spiritual texts across all cultures and religions. I have come to understand this from modern sages such as Neale Donald Walsh, Marianne Williamson, Ester and Jerry Hicks, Michael Neill, Deepak Chopra, Byron Katie all of whose work I love and I have found to be transformational in my own life. I personally believe that this is the single most important lesson/skill we can learn as human beings.

I don’t expect you to accept what I am saying here, especially if you are new to this idea, without investigating and exploring the idea for yourself. What I am hoping to do is simply drawing your attention to the possibility that it might be true…..

It’s not about “positive thinking”

The most important thing to recognise here, is that this not about “positive thinking”…..it’s not about trying to pretend to yourself that everything is rosy and telling yourself you are happy when in fact you are miserable.

It’s OK to feel angry or bad

Instead, it is crucially important to acknowledge how you currently feel and allow yourself to feel like that. Are you angry, sad, depressed, scared? We are so conditioned to believe that these thoughts are “not OK”.  In fact, it’s when we constantly push down and push away these thoughts and emotions that they build up and up inside us like steam in a pressure cooker until finally we just cannot keep them down any more and we “snap” or have a breakdown or go into meltdown.

Go within

So go within yourself and ask if what you are really feeling about whatever it is in your life that is causing you most trouble or stress. Then take a deep breath and give yourself permission to feel whatever emotion comes up for you. Know that whatever you feel, it is OK to feel like that and it is normal.

What feeling gives you relief?

Once you have allowed that thought to surface and you have acknowledged it and accepted it and no longer feel the urge to push it back down (this could take seconds, days or weeks) then you can start to ask, what would give you relief from that feeling? It might be that if you are feeling depressed, it would feel better to feel angry. If might be that if you are angry it would give you relief to feel blame or worry. Once you feel blame or worry, it is possible to move from there to pessimism and from there to contentment, and from there to peace, and from there to acceptance, and from there to love and joy.  All of these incremental steps are possible when to go from depths of depression or the throws of anger straight to joy is simply impossible.

This is why it is so infuriating when someone tells you to “just snap out of it and be positive”.

Allow yourself instead to take the time to take gradual incremental steps of feeling relief… search for the thoughts that give you a sense of relief and when you find them keep with those thoughts until you can find one that gives even more relief.

When you feel better everything starts to go your way

This process takes practice but it is so very worthwhile because when you really feel better (rather than just trying to think happy positive thoughts while pushing the uncomfortable ones away) then everything starts to go your way.

Try it.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author. All articles published on Life Coach Directory are reviewed by our editorial team.

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