Feeling good on purpose

That is IT.  The purpose of life is feeling good.  It’s not about making money, saving the planet, being an awesome parent, leaving a legacy. Yours (and mine and everybody else’s) reason for being is to feel good.

It may be that making money, saving the planet, being an awesome parent or leaving a legacy makes you feel good and that is great. Keep doing it! But what I’m getting at here is that there is one underlying principle of life which will help you choose where to focus your time, energy and attention, it will help you navigate challenges in life with more ease and it will bring more joy to you regardless of what you do. And the best bit is……it is REALLY simple. 

That principle is that life is not to be enjoyed NOT endured. We are here to discover what feels good and to live create our lives from that energy. That is it.

Sound too good to be true?

Ok, let’s look at what is going on when we don’t feel good.

Fill in the gap in this sentence – “I am upset because                         ”

It may be that you are not upset in this moment but I feel pretty sure that you have felt upset at some point in the not too distant past so, bring that time back into your awareness and remember what it was that made you feel upset.

Feeling upset sits in the category of feeling bad rather than feeling good. It brings up feelings of disturbance, disruption, discomfort, disappointment and worry. Not good, right?

Now, take a look at what you put in that gap – “I am upset because                         ” – what have you attributed your upset to? 

• Something someone else did or didn’t do
• Something that didn’t work out the way you hoped or planned
• Something someone said or how they acted towards you or someone else
• Not being in control or being under the control of others
• Being ignored or undervalued

What each of these have in common is that they lie outside of you. The source of your upset sits with someone or something that is external and feels outside of your control. You are not alone. It’s what we all do, until we realise and then choose to refocus on feeling good.

The upset we feel inside is always attributed to something outside of ourselves and what happens is we develop a pattern inside which justifies the emotional disturbance we feel. We find a reason for the discomfort we feel which allows us to feel upset (even to indulge those feelings) because it is someone else’s fault and therefore feeling bad is justified.

Why would we do this? 

Well, it gives us a way out. If it is something that is happening to us then we are the victim and we have no power to make it better until and unless someone else does something first. This is how it seems when seen from the ego’s perspective - the ego that wants to be right, wants to be in control and when it finds it isn’t, looks to someone else to blame.

Look at the political situation in most countries around the world, or the climate emergency or the cost of living crisis and you can see macro level challenges that have a lot of bad feeling attached to them right now. At a micro level we get caught in this victim way of being in our everyday life when our partner or children don’t clear up after themselves, when our boss lands yet another pile of work or new deadline on us or when we get so busy we stop looking ourselves as well as we need to.

There is an alternative perspective to this. A perspective which shifts us away from the bad feeling and points us back to feeling good.

Feeling good is our natural default state. Look at small children, they know this, and they are always finding ways to get back to a state of feeling good. They are in tune with and listen much more closely to this alternative (non-ego) perspective and they are willing to say no to that which makes them feel bad in favour of that which makes them feel good.

(Take a look at the video mini series I’ve made to remind you what it’s like to be connected with that part of yourself).

As we become adults we seem to lose connection with this part of ourselves but (this the best part!), we can rediscover that connection and it’s not as difficult as it might seem. It’s a bit like learning to use a different technology than the one you’ve become used to, and that new technology makes it faster and easier than the old fashioned, long hand version (a bit like using a calculator to do maths when you are used to doing long division!!!)

So, what does feeling good feel like for you? 

Take a moment to pause and sense into the feelings of feeling good. Where do you feel it in the body? What emotions does it evoke? What images come to mind? Are there sounds that come with the experience?

Imagine feeling like that whenever you want to.

Imagine if you could call that to yourself at any time, regardless of what was going on around you. How would your life be if your only job was to notice when you didn’t feel like that and then switch perspective so you could?

That might sound a bit fanciful and I appreciate that you have a job or other responsibilities. But just consider how different those would be when done from a place of feeling good rather than tired, frustrated, angry, overwhelmed or frightened.

So, this is my invitation to you…….to experiment with consciously bringing your awareness inside and to feeling good. Start by committing to doing it for an hour. Set a timer so you can forget about the time and go about your usual activities just keeping asking yourself “how could this feel good?” and then “what feels good about this?” and so on with each thing you do over that hour.

Once you’ve done it for an hour you can extend it to a couple of hours, or from getting up to lunch time and then to a whole day. The key is to make it timebound so it doesn’t feel impossible and also to approach it with a childlike curiosity, as a game. You can’t get this wrong!

Notice what you notice. What surprised you, what felt different than it usually does, when was it easier to do than at other times? It would be great to read your reflections so pop them into the comments below.

This is all about bringing awareness back inside and shifting from victim mode to owner. Being the owner of your experience and choosing how you’d like to feel in each moment rather than being at the mercy of someone or something else.

As Eleanor Roosevelt said:

“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”

I’m curious to hear how you get on and so I’d like to offer you a second invitation and that is to have a 30 minute conversation with me about what you noticed. We can’t always see the treasure in our experience ourselves and so it really helps to hear it reflected back by someone else and that’s what I can do. So, drop me an email and we’ll arrange a time to get on a call for a half hour conversation to rediscover your power to feel good..