"What’s wrong with me?"
Have you ever found yourself in a low mood and then you start to wonder WHY you feel this way…? Before you know it, your mind has set about trying to work out what's wrong with you (after all weren't you feeling just fine yesterday?).
I wonder if you have also noticed how despite the effort to shift this bad mood, in reality it’s not so easy…?
In fact not only does trying to figure out why we feel bad and trying to fix it not work, but it can often lead to us to going around in circles with thoughts like ‘what’s wrong with me?’ ‘Why am I in such a bad mood?’ ‘Why can’t I just cheer up?’ digging ourselves deeper and deeper into a hole.
What started as a brief moment of irritability, sadness or disappointment has led to a real downward spiral.
So what can we do that might help, and not take us further down into a hole?
As odd as it might sound, the less we try to make ourselves feel happy the better.
I like to think of these different mood states as like the passing weather. Right now, as I write it’s very windy and rainy outside. Let’s say, I don’t like windy wet weather. I’m sure we’d all agree that going outside and shouting at the wind to stop, trying to work out all the reasons it’s like this, or trying to make it change to calm, sunny day would be ridiculous, and even comical.
And yet this is what we do with our ‘internal weather’.
We wrestle with it, fight it, reject it, complain about it, try and replace it. Perhaps at some level we truly believe that we should have control over our emotional landscape by now!
And of course this is so understandable.
It is unpleasant to feel certain emotions, and therefore it is natural to find ourselves resisting.
Next time your ‘inner weather’ is not what you hoped for, try this:
Notice the knee jerk reaction to tighten and contract. The thoughts and judgements, the efforts to escape and instead experiment with giving the feelings some space…giving them all the space they need to pass through. Remember these too are just like the weather, and don’t define who you are.
What you are is far bigger, more majestic and vast.
Try releasing some pressure by reminding yourself kindly that you're not supposed to feel happy all of the time. That it’s more than okay to stop treating your sadness and other unwanted feelings as problems that need to be fixed.
You are not a problem to be fixed but a mystery to be lived!