Chronic reacting is about as close to a disease as anything, and the vast majority of humans suffer from it. As people with near limitless power, somehow we have grown to the point where we give it all away and make ourselves small and helpless. Your work has the power to destroy your mood. Your friends and family can make you upset when they share stories about what upset them that day. Your spouse can send you into a wave of anger if they look at you the wrong way. Even the television has power over you, causing you to go into a panic if it stops working. And how many times have you yelled at your phone when it lost signal?
Does that all sound a little ridiculous to you?
The simple and concrete truth is that no one has the power over how you feel. Not one person, not one situation, no where, no how, no way. Only you can control your happiness. That's right, you. And it is YOU that gives the TV power over you. It is you that hands all the power to control you over to your boss.
No one and no thing has power over you that you did not give away.
Why do you do that? You do that because sometimes it's easier to play the victim than to own up to your own responsibilities in your life. Making decisions can be hard to such a powerful life-form as yourself, and it feels a little easier when other people or things can make those decisions for you. And what decisions do you let things around you make for you? You let things around you make decisions on your mood- on the very basics of how you feel inside- which is to say, you let them control your entire being.
Everything. All of it.
That's right. You are a powerless shell, controlled by everyone and everything around you, reacting and responding only, and you have no one to blame but yourself.
You are the one that put on those handcuffs.
If this shocks you and makes you angry, do not be alarmed. You are reacting and responding as usual, but through realization comes change, and, through change, you can win your power back.
You can find your happiness without anyone giving it to you. You can earn it fair and square.
How can you do that? If you are one of those vast majority of people who suffer from Chronic Reacting Syndrome (as I aptly call it), there is hope, and it is actually easier than you probably realize. Every moment is a new test, and every moment you make a new choice. You can choose to give all your power away, or you can choose to own it for yourself. It doesn't matter if you were a Chronic Reactor in the past, because everything is wiped clean the moment you make your next decision or let it be made. It is only this moment that determines who you are.
A simple step to helping you remain in control is to treat every mood snatcher as an attempted hostile takeover of control over your mind and body. A mood snatcher is typically anything that you would normally react to in a negative way. By not giving them the power to change you, you remain in charge, and it's as simple as that. It can be hard in the beginning to get out of old patterns of control because they have been exercised for so long it has become your nature, but the more you practice, the better you get, and the less control the outside world has over you.
Code words are an effective way to help remember when you are giving control away. Sometimes all it takes in a glint of anger to have your mind automatically resorting to its code word. For instance, you could use the words "still", "calm", or "control", to associate with the feelings of sadness or anger, so that when you feel those emotions coming on, your first thoughts could be: be "still", "calm" down, don't give away "control". This can all help remind you in time to stop a reaction before it has the chance to bubble up.
So, when no one else has control over you, then what? What will you feel when there is no one else to decide that for you?
That's where choosing your mood and choosing your life come in. If there is no one in control over how you feel, then there is only one option left, and that's to choose happiness. No one would choose sadness or anger if they had the choice, and you have infinite choices. You CHOOSE happiness, and you FEEL happiness, because that is YOUR decision.
Happiness is a decision. You either choose to feel it, or you choose not to. If you think it's not that easy, you are dead wrong. And the best part about it is that like creates like. The happier you are, the easier it is to be happy, and the more life creates situations that help you to be happy.
So, the next time you are sad, angry, depressed, etc, ask yourself what you have the power to control. Ask yourself, "Am I making a conscious decision to be happy right now, or is something choosing my mood for me?"
And remember that a Happy Seeker is not someone who is happy all the time because their life is seemingly perfect. A Happy Seeker is not someone who is completely different from you, with totally different circumstances. Everyone has power over their own life, and, whether you believe that fact or not, you are exercising your right to choice daily. No, a Happy Seeker is a chooser because they know they have that power. A Happy Seeker has made the choice to seek out happiness, in any and all situations, and control their own destiny. By choosing their mood, they have chosen their life.
Happy Seeking,
Jekka
