Choosing our emotions

Excerpt from

Choosing Your Emotions Instead of Letting Them Choose You by Laura Munson

And my answer is: no one can cause you to have an emotion. It's playground politics all over again. No one can "make" you mad or feel guilty or cry or laugh. Physically, yes, a black eye is a black eye. But emotionally, it's always a choice. I read somewhere recently that we have around 60,000 thoughts a day and something like 75-80 % of them are negative. That doesn't surprise me one bit. We have chosen to become emotional victims and I think it's because there's a pay-off to it. We get to be right. We have told ourselves a story a long time ago that we are powerful when we________. Or conversely, not powerful when we are not__________. And then we let those equations run our lives and determine our perceptions and reactions so that we can prove our story true. Our inner critic screams, megaphone to our heart: "See, I told you the world sucks. I told you you would fail. I told you you are powerless."


But  what if we chose to see that our real power is in loving ourselves, even when we are at our worst? That we are enough. What if we turned that inner critique into a cheerleader? What would happen? My answer: we would find the freedom of the present moment.


for full article - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-munson/choosing-your-emotions-in_b_845897.html