When you and I spend some time together, professionally, there’s every chance that you’ll feel better.
Which is great, of course—lovely, even!—but it’s not the point.
Feeling good is a means to an end, not the end itself.
But minds, being minds, they have a tendency to create a story around the experience of feeling better.
(Creating stories around our experience is the mind’s No.1 job. It’s kinda what they do!)
Often it’s to come up with legitimate-sounding concerns.
This won't stick
Another flavour I encounter is, “This won’t stick.”
The mind observes you feeling better, sees that this has happened in a particular circumstance (e.g. on a call with me); does that classic outside-in thing of attaching the feeling to something outside of you (me/the call); pipes up that you won’t be on the call for much longer; projects into the future to a scenario it normally finds a bit difficult and arrives at that conclusion:
“Oh, this won’t stick.”
It’s textbook mind. It’s got no idea what’s actually going on, so it thinks in very simple, black and white terms: feeling good/feeling bad… cause/effect.
But none of this is about feeling good.
It’s seeing something deeper about the very nature of your experience: here, now; and in the past; and forever into the future… and that doesn’t really happen when you’re all caught up in a bunch of negative thinking and misery.
Feeling good is a means to an end, not the end itself.
If you want something to make you intermittently feel better, may I suggest exercise, or perhaps eating biscuits. Alcohol’s good, too, I seem to remember. Gambling works for some. Or shopping. You could do some emergency, interventional meditation or employ whatever mind-hack they taught you in your CBT sessions.
And those “won’t stick” either.
Of course you’re not going to always “feel good” – you’re human, FFS! 🤦🏻♂️
However, insightfully seeing the nature of the experience you’re having, and who you really are underneath all that stormy weather of experience… that’s what’s going to make the biggest difference in your life, going forwards.
That’s when you become “less bothered by being bothered” (another t-shirt idea, maybe?) and get to show up in life authentically, fully, freely, open to it all.
However you feel.
💟
Giles