You gotta’ appreciate those dark moments of the soul, when you
feel like running away – or wish you could just stop feeling more pain – and the
Inner Voice nonchalantly brings light to the matter as if to say, “This too
will pass.”
The shower was my altar on one such day. I was going through the
mindless motions: towel—razor—iPod. “Hmm. What music do I feel like?” Scan the
playlists. “Jason Mraz. Yeah, he’s upbeat.” I set the water temp; hopped in, then—all
those disturbing thoughts came rushing in a-n-d the beliefs about those
thoughts, while tears and water ran down my face. “OMG, I’m thinking pretty
much like I just want to fade away…”
Outside the shower the music and lyrics pierced through that
moment of despair, blaring past all the noise in my head, going deep into my
heart.
In the workbook I authored, Resolution Focused Living, I devoted a whole chapter dealing with
the link between beliefs, thoughts, and resulting emotions:
In general, humans know
and use only three methods of dealing with low energy emotions: express
(nice word for vent); attempt to suppress the emotion (hide); or flight
(cope)…. What we believe about an event or circumstance forms our
thoughts. Thoughts about people and events will then generate our emotional
responses to them, the event, or to surrounding circumstances.
We can use
self-awareness and non-judgmental observance to reprocess and let go of low
energy emotion(s) by tracking them backward, like links in a chain, to the low
energy thoughts and the low energy underlying belief they were built upon.
So this is what I heard in the song Hey Love by Jason Mraz--reiterating these
thoughts in a metaphoric and creative manner:
Hey Love, where you going to? You’re not
sleeping anymore, you’re just trying to. (A
wake-up call to self-awareness) Stay
love, where you running
to? (Attempt to cope by flight) Come away, come away ... if a chosen word has you cornered, then it’s a lesson learned (non-judgmental
self-observance) like, close
the book (quit beating yourself up) before it burns you (low
energy emotions), come away
(step back, take another more objective look), come away (let go), from all these things unseen (a mind running wild), at the price you paid I promise you won’t believe
anything they say (objective truth exposes faulty
beliefs—dissolve the inner dialog and move on!). (Continuing to buy into the
unconstructive) Belief will
only disappoint you!
Carol A. Meadors, M.A., Licensed Professional Counselor
WEBSITE: www.lifefocus.org
KINDLE BOOKS: www.lifefocusonline.org
