With the way life has become digital and moving at a really fast pace, it is possible to get your beliefs and values all muddled up just to meet up with the demands of an ever-changing society. We become more and more oblivious of the things that make us who we are because we are all struggling with things we shouldn’t. When you choose something like a belief or a value, it will most likely affect what you project onto people.
If your greatest value is money, it will definitely be at the helm of your affairs and will affect greatly the way you see the universe. If you choose family, your mind will be woven towards thinking that it is the best life and will definitely bear down on you. So much that if you talk to people about finding their way and about what to believe, you may just be teaching them based on your own beliefs even though this may not even be your intention.
The Mind
Let’s make use of an analogy. When you’re driving, there’s the thinking mind and the feeling mind. A lot of times we believe that it is the thinking mind that’s doing the driving because it is more conscious and rational and we tend to like the feeling mind to a teenager throwing a tantrum in the back seat of the car. We are obviously elated that it is the thinking mind driving and so we feel safe. Well, this is where our mind plays a game on us. In actual fact, it is the feeling mind that’s driving while our thinking mind just takes a backseat.
Kind of like your mind when your character or irate actions are all over the place and you can’t seem to tame them so the rational you take a back seat. With such situations, what to do is negotiate. So, you throw a decision or an option open to both minds and let them think it out. You would notice that somehow your feeling mind and the thinking one will come to a consensus about it and then it will be a lot easier to move on without having to fight yourself.
Emotions
Our emotions are just an interpretation of the presence or the absence of pain. Where there’s none, our brain interprets happiness and laughter but where there’s a pain, we feel sorrow and sadness. Our thinking brain thinks in terms of cause and effect but our feeling brain thinks in terms of values and beliefs and which of them matters the most. So, if our feeling brain thinks highly of ourselves, we interpret it to be high self-esteem but if it thinks lowly of us and projects that to other people, we are led to believe and interpret it as having low self-esteem. So, a lot of times people try so much to change a person’s self-esteem from the outside but this is impossible because it has to start within.
Our identities are not ideologically constructed. We are most often than not made by our feelings. Our identities are a function of our feelings and if it is so, then to change how we feel about ourselves, we need to dig deep. This is because it could be an event or a memory in a place that changed the way our feeling mind sees us. So, digging deeper to understand such events and validate your feelings in the process could change the way you see yourself.
Challenge
Above all though, the ultimate is to seek out ways to better improve yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically and otherwise. When you seek out other things, books or sources that you gravely disagree with or that threaten the fabrics of your values or beliefs and learn about them, what it does is to soften you and bring you to a place of inclusion. It makes you less angry at the world and more receptive of the differences that are available. This does not in any way suggest that you would leave your beliefs or abandon your values but it suggests a way to coexist or live without throwing so much hate. It is a way to challenge yourself to step into your discomfort but doing it in a more intellectual way.
Constantly challenging yourself to be better is the whole essence of life. We live to be better persons who we were yesterday. This is a concept that remains static.
