Your feelings are caused by your thoughts as surely as night follows day. The thought in your mind is but a sentence that is either a passing thought or a repetitive one. The feeling is a sensation in your body that is caused by the quality of your thought. Positive thoughts produce nice feelings while negative thoughts incur aches in the body in the form of physical symptoms.
Related: How Your Mind-Body Relationship Is Deeply Connected
Your feelings are but memories of outer circumstances. You meet an old colleague who stirs in you feelings of uneasiness. It’s been so many years since you met but when you see him now you forget what he said to you, what he did to you. What you vividly recall now is how he made you feel. That feeling never changes and will never change. The opposite is true when you recall the nice feelings of someone who kept on motivating you. You don’t remember anything but that feeling of elevation.
Pursuing the origin of your feelings can be a worthwhile goal. Should you tie your feelings to the external stimuli such as others’ opinions of you; you will be at the mercy of events. You are shaped by others’ opinions of you. One made you suffer, the other made you elevated. Your feelings must come from your conscious thinking that got to be qualitative and self-correcting. You are then mastering your feelings not being mastered by them. Being a witness helps you change your feelings by first changing your disempowering thoughts.
Related: How To Stop A Negative Thought In its Track
Our feeling is the experience we get when we are in touch with an object. That object might be a person or a brand. The brand that excels in service is due to making people feel good about connecting with the brand. The feel or experience one get when he is at Starbucks is more than drinking coffee, it’s a feeling of relaxation and community.
Many thriving businesses have turned their businesses around into customer service because of the importance of having a memorable experience. Business shift to experience was a result of Maya Angelou’s quote that says: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Still, I don’t whole-heartedly embrace this concept as I see that our feelings should be derived from within (our thinking) not from without (external world).
Your feelings are caused by the quality of your thoughts. Your thoughts are the result of the state of your mind. If suffering is the state of your mind your thoughts will be the carrier of that state and the accompanied feelings follow. And vice versa. Being conscious of your thoughts will determine the quality of your feelings.
