Your Feelings are Self-Made

Imagine it's early in the morning, and you are standing in the bakery, waiting for your turn to buy a baguette. (There's no baguette where you live? Never mind, just imagine you're French.) Suddenly some guy rushes in, ignores you and loudly asks for two croissants right under your nose. How do you react?

You could feel humiliated, remember that other people always walk all over you, but be too timid to claim your breadly rights (and feel bad about that too).
You could think “Wow, this guy must really be in a hurry today!”, smile and admire the beautiful cake in front of you.
You could be outraged at such rudeness, step forward and politely but firmly ask for your baguette, dammit.
You could feel sorry for the poor devil, because you imagine he gets whipped around by his wife and has to bring her croissants asap or else she'll nag at him for a month.

There is not only one single way to react to a given situation.

The way you feel, what you think and how you behave in any situation is never caused directly by the situation itself. It's only the consequence of the way you perceive this situation.

This is linked to whether you judge what happens as good, bad, neutral, or don't judge it at all. It depends on what the situation means to you. You will see it through the filter of your beliefs and interpret it accordingly. You will be influenced in that by your general attitude and way of being. More generally, your reaction is a manifestation of your mental, emotional and energetic state of being.

The feelings of someone who is usually in a state of fear and insecurity will be completely different from the feelings of someone who is in a confident state of power and peace, even if the situation is the same.

Fortunately, we are not the victims of our beliefs and state of being! We can pick our beliefs. We can choose to engage with certain energies, or not. Therefore, we are free to choose how we react. We are the creators of our own feelings.

Which also means that we are 100% responsible for them. If we are the ones creating and choosing them, then logically they are entirely our own responsibility and nobody else's. Full power and full responsibility go hand in hand.

As I learned in my Soul Realignment training, sometimes we have some blocks at soul-level that create negative thoughts and/or emotions in us. These thoughts and emotions are not truly ours, even though we identify them as such. In such a case, it can be difficult to choose how we feel. No matter how much we work on it, we will just have this negative stuff pop into our mind and make us feel bad.

However, we only have these soul-level blocks because at some point we made a choice that allowed them to be there. We didn't do it intentionally or consciously, but it still was our doing. So, indirectly, our feelings still are the consequence of our own choice. The only difference is that if we are affected by such a soul-level block, we might need some Soul Realignment to get rid of it, whereas if we don't have such a block, we have the full power to change our feelings right now. In the end it still boils down to the fact that we are 100% responsible for them.

I once lost my best friend over the 100% responsibility principle. When I discovered it, I was in a very close friendship with a girl I liked a lot. Realizing that I was responsible for my own feelings was one of the biggest breakthroughs in my life! It was several years ago. Back then, I was emotionally unstable and struggling with negative feelings. The idea of being able to choose the way I felt was like paradise to me. It opened completely unexpected doors.

Of course she was the first one I told about it. To my great surprise, she got very angry. She perceived it as meaning that her feelings would be her fault and that she would not be entitled to feel bad anymore. I tried to explain to her that it has nothing to do with fault. I was so enthusiastic. All I saw was the awesome power such an attitude gives us. But she maintained that others cause her feelings, and that for any normal person, feeling bad is a logical and necessary consequence of crappy life circumstances.

I remember her defending her powerlessness as if it were a right. Or even a duty. Like, if someone is mean to you and you don't feel bad, then you must be some kind of heartless bitch. We had a big heated argument about this and from that day on I never saw her again. She just stopped calling. I didn't call her either. I just knew we were not compatible with each other anymore. So I let her go.

It is true that when we accept full responsibility for our feelings, we cannot blame anybody else for them anymore. Damn. But on the other hand, it gives us so much power! It makes us invulnerable and safe no matter what our life circumstances are. Even when we don't succeed in feeling good all the time, at least we know that when we feel bad, we are the one actually choosing to feel bad. We are the one doing this to ourselves. Nobody else can hurt us as long as we don't accept to hurt ourselves.

Then we don't need to be afraid of things such as rejection, abandonment or judgment anymore. We can let go of control and protections. Bye bye, walls and weapons. What a freedom! :-)