You are not what you think you are, even if you believe that you are. You have feelings of inferiority, fear, anger and fainting? Everybody knows unpleasant emotions. We accept them like a law of nature, even if we suffer from them for years. But we can overcome them. We show you precise methods with which you can free yourself from your ego prison of negative emotions.
You should read on if you want to practice self-love, if you want to deal better with fears and feelings of inferiority, or if you want to live more attentively and calmly.
Do you have a loving relationship with yourself?
Many of us have a strong sense of cleanliness when it comes to clothes. Stains are treated immediately, worn things end up in the laundry. When it comes to our psyche, we are more careless. Difficult emotions like sadness, anger and guilt make our inner world dirty undisturbed. Although we suffer, we do not do house cleaning.
What’s the matter with you? Because when we were kids we didn’t learn how to keep our insides clean. Soul care was not on the timetable. In this article you will learn how stressful emotions arise and how you can transform them with the help of simple mindfulness techniques and inner-child work to make your inner self shine again.
We also want to show you how you can heal emotional wounds with a journey into the past, what emotional imbalance is shown in excessive serial marathons and what the difference is between good and bad control.
Who decides if you get into painful emotional states? Your mind
Imagine you’re sitting in a café and at the next table you see a little child having a terrible rage. At first, the mother lets the child rage. Then she changes her strategy and asks: “Why are you so angry?”
And suddenly it becomes quiet at the next table. What happened? A simple question catapulted the child out of his emotional state and into the perspective of observation.
Even though most adults do not publicly live out their anger in cafés, we also know painful emotions. Only we keep our inner suffering to ourselves. Sometimes over months and years. Often it would only take a change of perspective to free us from such emotions.
But how does this change of perspective work at all?
The answer to this question can be found in our brain.
There’s consciousness first. Consciousness is an intelligent field within you that perceives all sensations. This is not to be confused with your attention. Attention is what decides in you which of the many sensations your brain processes. Your attention throws itself with preference on what it already knows and on which it was trained. Everything it captures is then evaluated by your mind. And at exactly this point painful emotions arise for many people, because they blindly believe the first evaluation their mind whispers to them.
But you are not helplessly at the mercy of this inner evaluation authority. Imagine your consciousness as a house. Positive emotions are the beautiful garden around it. If you sunbathe yourself on the terrace of your house, you are well. But your mind tries to lure you again and again with its evaluations into the interior of the house, into the altogether 10 rooms of painful emotions.
We’ll take a closer look at each room next. You will experience what it feels like in the rooms, how you get into them and with which strategies you find your way back to positive emotions. Where your attention goes, your reality arises.
Can you overcome control with devotion?
You drink 6 cups of coffee every day to be particularly concentrated and efficient? You run from one appointment to the next and in the evening you lie awake because your thoughts are in a continuous loop? All these are signs that you are often in the “control room” of your consciousness, the center of your consciousness. Almost all other states of consciousness are derived from this. But what exactly happens to us when we are mentally in the control room?
Control is our attempt to cope with fears and worries. Fear of financial ruin, illness and death: When you are in the control room, you look pessimistically at the world and are constantly on your guard. Nevertheless, most people enjoy staying in this room because they feel safe in it. Still better than getting into other emotionally difficult rooms – that seems to be the motto.
But the constant effort to keep everything under control means above all stress. It also makes you hard against yourself and others. Extensive visits to the control room turn controlling into addiction. Joy appears more and more as a foreign word. Because if you play negative future scenarios regularly in your thoughts, in order to prepare for possible problems, you put your body under permanent stress. You are threatened with burn-out and other stress disorders. Because your body interprets your thoughts as if it were making the actual experience.
The key to leaving the control room is devotion! Realize that you can control very little in life. Fears are nothing but negative future fantasies, but you can’t control the future anyway. So why don’t you just relax and live in the here and now?
Try the 4 steps of mindfulness:
- First concentrate on your breath and your body.
- Walk with your attention through every part of your body.
- Then perceive your thoughts and feelings lovingly and accept them.
- Direct your attention in a new direction.
If you make this arriving in the here and now and directing your attention into a lifelong habit, you will become less and less in the grip of control. Mindfulness works like a muscle. The more often you use it, the stronger it becomes.
Feedback and self-friendliness work against feelings of inferiority, but self-overestimation is not the solution
It’s your birthday and you baked a cake for your colleagues in the office. Everyone congratulates you, you feel good. But when you pass by the coffee kitchen a few hours later, only a few pieces of the cake have disappeared. You start to ponder. Did you do something wrong with the recipe? Should you have just bought a cake? At the celebration of the colleague last week the cake had disappeared directly and everyone praised it…
If you think like that, you’ll be in the “depreciation room”. Your inner critic bombards you with self-doubt. The longer you listen to him, the more insecure and anxious you become, until you finally lie on the couch with a full-grown depression and can no longer get up.
Even the way out of the depreciation room leads via mindfulness. You create a first distance to your negative thoughts by first concentrating on your breath and letting your perception wander through your body. In a second step you observe what you are thinking and feeling. Take it lovingly and not judgingly perceive. You are not the way your thoughts want to talk you into it. You are their observer. Talk to yourself about how you would talk to a good friend who is in a bad way. The more often you train this friendly attitude, the quieter your inner critic will talk and the rarer he will speak at all.
You haven’t found yourself in the description of the depreciation room yet? This does not mean that you do not know any feelings of inferiority. Perhaps you belong to those people who silence their inner critics by simply directing criticism against others. The project is going badly? You don’t want to admit to yourself that you could have screwed it up, so the others are incapable. And you make that clear to them, too. Welcome to the “hubris room”.
When you are self-righteous and arrogant, you lose sincere, close relationships in this room. And that doesn’t feel good. To get out of the hubris space, you have to learn to respect boundaries. Yes, maybe you would have done it differently or better, but don’t interfere in other people’s affairs. Use the 4 steps of mindfulness to catch yourself with the hubris in flagrante. Ask others for feedback as well. Because only if you know that you are lost in the hubris room can you find your way back to the garden.
End your self-pity by accepting reality – and then acting right
Your partner hasn’t told you he loves you in too long. Okay, there was the romantic candlelight dinner the other day, but you have to hear the words: I – love – you. And not just once, but better every day. Maybe you’re also addicted to compliments. If you don’t get a nice comment on your outfit, you’ll be deadly unhappy immediately.
In both cases you are stuck in the “need room” of your consciousness. Here you permanently feel a lack. Your environment simply doesn’t give you what you need and from your point of view it absolutely deserves. Therefore you feel bad and bathe in self-pity. That you have influence on your emotions does not occur to you. In truth, you are always free to take off your negative glasses and leave the space of need.
The 4 steps of mindfulness help you again. Especially the third step is now important: Accept reality as it is. External circumstances do not have to dictate how you feel. Why do some people cope better with the death of a close relative than others? Because it is not the external circumstances that decide. More important are the thoughts about the circumstances that trigger the emotion.
Is it hard for you to accept reality? Then it is probably because you had a traumatic experience in your childhood or experienced yourself again and again as a victim. Your presence is shaped by these experiences. You don’t even realize that you have completely different possibilities for action today as an adult. If you succeed in catching yourself in certain situations, as you slip into the childlike state, it helps if you do inner-child work, i.e. turn to the childlike part in you.
Take some time, find a place where you won’t be disturbed, and put yourself in a meditative state. Let the situation that triggered the neediness in you appear in front of your inner eye. Ask yourself which situation from your childhood the current situation reminds you of. You should turn to the image that intuitively first rises within you. Find out what you needed back then. Maybe a protector, encouraging words or a hug. Imagine how as an adult you would go into the situation of that time to give your inner child exactly that. If you use the exercise regularly, you can correct the lack of that time. It is not the outer situation that triggers an inner state in you, but what you think about it.
To overcome guilt, you must forgive yourself
It was just one night. Your partner was abroad, you felt alone. So you went to celebrate with friends. And woke up with a stranger next to you. Now your feelings of guilt are eating you up. Why couldn’t you control yourself?
Guilt, shame and a guilty conscience take you hostage, you are stuck in the room of guilt. Your only company? Your inner critic, who holds up to you in a continuous loop how you have failed and that your misery is only right for you.
If you are trapped in the room of guilt, you live mentally in the past and are constantly trying to make up for mistakes you have made. Performance alone is not enough for you, you try to anticipate and fulfil the wishes of your counterpart in anticipatory obedience. Or you take yourself extremely back, so that no mistake happens to you. In any case you wait in this room for 3 redeeming words: I forgive you. Only for that you have ears. Because these words have a liberating effect for you.
But your hope is usually disappointed. For our inner critic convinces us that the forgiveness of others is either not meant seriously or that we have not yet paid enough debt and must continue to pay. This makes you even more lonely and depressed.
In the room of guilt, you are at war with your inner reality. You expect that you should have acted or felt differently, instead of realizing that you did not know better or could not do otherwise in that moment. When you cheat, you are not guilty. You believed in that moment your thoughts that thought it was a good idea. But that doesn’t mean that you’re not responsible. If you confess the false step to your partner and he then separates from you, you have to deal with it and take responsibility for your actions.
There’s only one way out of the guilt room: self-forgiveness. Create distance to the voice of the inner critic who holds you in the past. Forgive yourself that you had such a limited perspective back then and that your decision seemed to be the only option. Instead, accept reality as it is now.
How to release yourself from the grip of fear with acceptance
“You, incompetent? I never said that.” That’s where it happened. You gossiped with your colleagues about the scatterbrained accountant and now he’s standing in front of you to confront you. Confronted with the bitter truth, you have only 2 possibilities: to deny everything or to stand by your words and apologize.
By denying everything and denying reality, you enter directly into the “denial room”. Fear and shame drive you in. Probably you are afraid that your colleague will go to your boss and your blasphemy will have serious consequences for you. And you are ashamed because you actually expect a different behavior from yourself.
The denial room is also a place for all those who polish up their ego with little lies. You may be familiar with the phenomenon that many things are presented more beautifully than they actually are via social media. The morning picture of a relaxed breakfast comes from the weekend, while in reality you’re trying to meet the deadline in a completely stressed-out state. But the truth doesn’t match the casual image you give yourself. The price of truth correction: fear of being exposed as an impostor.
Maybe you also belong to those people who shy away from conflicts and therefore hold it with the three monkeys – hear nothing, see nothing, say nothing. The sales figures are on the decline? You should be having some unpleasant conversations, but instead you’re pretending nothing’s wrong and sitting out the situation.
How to get out of the denial room? By acknowledging the truth. Yes, you blasphemed about your colleague. Yes, not everything is always super relaxed in your independence. If you admit that you have problems, it makes you emotionally free. That’s why participants of the anonymous alcoholics introduce themselves at their meetings with the words: “My name is x.x. and I’m addicted to alcohol”. They end their denial and take responsibility for their actions.
Denial is always between you and other people. It makes you lonely and real relationships become impossible. If you have recognized yourself in this room, you do not have to tell everyone everything immediately. For example, it is perfectly okay to first talk to a good friend about something you have always denied. If you feel a sense of relief, go this way step by step until you are back in the green of your garden.
You can overcome inner resistances with targeted attention
Many people already start to build a “resistance room” in their childhood because they want to protect themselves. Before their parents’ outbursts of anger or even physical violence. A kind of habituation occurs, one closes down in conflicts. And that remains so even as an adult.
If you retreat quickly because you don’t feel like what your counterpart wants from you, you sit in the resistance room. As soon as you feel under pressure, overtaxed, manipulated or threatened, you retract your head. It doesn’t matter whether you are a friend, partner or colleague. Instead of openly discussing your concerns, you become monosyllabic and silent.
In this room, you see the others as enemies. If it really gets too much for you, you also shoot back verbally or literally strike at yourself. Your behavior is externally reminiscent of that of a defiant child or moody teenager. But as an adult, the consequences are more serious for you. Your partnership can go to pieces, sometimes this entrenchment even costs you your job.
But how can you tear down the walls and stop your campaigns? By changing your communication. It is quite possible to assert your point of view and at the same time maintain an appreciative relationship with your counterpart. For example, if you disagree with a suggestion, you can answer: “Thank you for your opinion, but I don’t want to do it this way.”
And no matter how yours behaves towards you: Make yourself aware that he is not your enemy, but simply a person who cannot act otherwise. Just like yourself.
Some people also resist themselves so that they do not have to face unpleasant emotions such as sadness, anger or fear. But this does not mean that the emotions disappear. They come to the surface again and again and in the worst case they look for illnesses as a way of expression. Therefore give them the attention they demand. Go the 4 steps of mindfulness: Observe lovingly the emotions that have led you into the space of resistance without merging with them. And if it is not possible for you to accept these emotions, then agree with them. This is also a step towards emotional freedom.
Greed draws your attention to an emotional deficiency
I. Now. Now. Right now. That’s that mantra in the Room of Greed. If you stay here, you don’t know a measure. Shopping, sex, celebrating, gambling – you draw from the full, whatever your desires are focused on. Maybe you fill every free minute with appointments, as long as you are busy. Or you neglect your professional duties and spend hours daydreaming. Greed has many faces, only the drive is always the same.
Who is greedy, tries with all force to reach a state of saturation. It is always a matter of compensating for an agonizing emotional deficiency. For a short time, buying new shoes or enjoying a carefree night at the party provides a bit of relaxation. But the next day, the next morning, the relaxation is over. The feeling of lack returns, accompanied by shame and guilt about your own loss of control.
If you are regularly trapped in the room of greed, you have to deal with the cause: the emotional lack that torments you. What feelings would arise in you if you did not give in to your addictive desire? Do you feel loneliness, boredom or anxiety? You can find the answer within yourself with the help of mindfulness.
It is a mistake, by the way, that enjoyment and consumption are bad in any case. It always depends on whether you do something because it feels good or whether you want to push something else away with it. Only then does it become a problem.
To put greed behind you, you need to take a look at your food intake. It’s not about fruit, vegetables or bread, but about spiritual food, according to the Buddhist view of life. So everything you absorb through your senses: Meditation, nature, conversation and news. Observe which of these spiritual foods are good for you and which are not.
And if you do not always succeed in resisting the impulse of greed, be loving to yourself. Do not let the inner critic step on the plan, but continue your new path unflinchingly.
Your inner truth knows the way out of confusion
“The job is unbearable. I’m gonna quit.” Yesterday you were quite sure. The next day the world looks different again. The friends you ask for advice give you different answers: From “absolutely quit” to “rather not” everything is there. So you postpone the decision for weeks and months, and in the end you decide to leave everything as it was.
In the Room of Confusion, you’re ruled by doubt. In your thoughts you argue back and forth, but you come to no conclusion. Because you do not trust yourself, you orientate yourself on the opinions of others in your environment. Once you follow the advice, once the other. At some point you are totally overwhelmed and simply fall into a rigidity.
The confusion may relate to small or large life decisions. Maybe you’re thinking about changing your job. Or you are so insecure with every professional e-mail that you would like to show it to a colleague.
Even when you have finally made a decision, the doubts won’t stop. In the back of your mind you keep asking yourself: Wouldn’t it have been better if…? Was that really right?
Out of the room of confusion you will only find out when you succeed in listening to your heart instead of the confusion of your mind. When you concentrate on the here and now and lovingly perceive and accept your situation, you open access to your inner truth, which always knows what the next step is.
You have no idea what your inner truth is? It is the clear impulse that knows whether you would rather drink coffee or tea, travel to the beach or to the mountains. You can train the contact to your inner truth with such small everyday decisions. By the way, if you align yourself with it, that doesn’t mean that you switch off your mind. It is always good to check and consider facts, but your heart knows that anyway. Because it is connected to a higher intelligence.
When you act in harmony with your inner truth, you vibrate on a higher frequency of fullness, joy, clarity and gratitude. Stay consciously in this vibration as often as possible in everyday life. Then the new frequency will eventually become your new emotional home. You cannot lose the true self and you cannot find it because it is always present.
If everything seems hopeless to you, change the perspective
When the new colleague puts some documents on your desk, you smell the smell of his aftershaves. It smells of sea and lemon. And suddenly you’re 5 years old again, standing in the kitchen of your parents’ house and seeing your father marching angrily at you, you feel him grabbing your arm and dragging you into your room. The fear of that time is suddenly very close again.
Sometimes it’s inconspicuous little things that throw you into the room of powerlessness. They remind you of traumatic experiences from your childhood and awaken old emotions. Sometimes it is also present experiences that bring you into a state of powerlessness and hopelessness: Accidents, negative disease prognoses, abuse, violence, job loss or financial ruin.
In no other room is your pain so great. You feel that life is meaningless, that it is impossible for you to endure it any longer. You feel helpless under the circumstances. Some people freeze with fear, others become indifferent. Depression, hopelessness and loneliness are your only company.
The first step to get out of this emotional hell is to realize which trigger dragged you into space. Was it a fragrance that evoked a painful memory? Or have you recently been unable to work as a victim of an accident? Yes, you’re right, it’s all bad, but leave the past behind. In the present you can decide how your life goes on. In the present you are no longer a victim.
There are always examples of people who do not allow themselves to be thrown off track by even the most difficult blows of fate and who – on the contrary – only after these experiences have developed real strength and found their life task. For example, by working since then for other people with similar experiences. Develop trust in life: In the end, you cannot know whether something good will not come out of your pain in the future. Change your perspective. How you look at your trauma determines your quality of life.
And as absurd as it seems to you in the situation, try to laugh. Watch funny movies or do laughter yoga. Laughter is a wonderful way to get out of the ego spaces or to turn around on their threshold. Because as soon as you laugh at a situation and yourself, you take the observer’s perspective and gain distance.
You are the observer of your thoughts
You have in the past followed your mind into the trap of consciousness rooms. He has offered you thoughts that you have believed and fed with your attention. And zap, you were stuck in the dark house of consciousness.
In the past paragraphs you have now got to know the 10 rooms of the house of consciousness with their painful emotions. You have experienced how you can leave these rooms again and let it go well in the garden of positive feelings.
At first glance, there were different paths leading out of the rooms. On closer inspection, however, mindfulness always plays a central role. And with it the ability to observe your own thoughts.
In order to come into the observer position, at least a part of your mind must be equanimous to what is happening. But do not confuse equanimity with indifference. True equanimity is always neutral, deliberate and calm. If you notice that you become indifferent, you have obviously not yet found the observer within you that you are looking for.
The 4 steps of mindfulness always help you to take the neutral observer perspective. Arrive in the here and now, lovingly perceive what is. Accept your present situation and then give your thoughts a new direction.
The moment you begin to observe your thoughts, you are no longer trapped in your emotional nightmare. Rather, you observe your experience like a movie on the screen. A part of you still suffers, but you are no longer completely absorbed by pain. You create inner distance and thus gain emotional freedom.
This will also help you to gradually overcome the narrowness of your ego. Because you are the observer of your mind, you are more than your thoughts, emotions, your body and also your outer circumstances – all this is constantly changing. Your highest self, which perceives all these changes, always remains the same. You are pure consciousness.
If you release yourself regularly from the spaces of your consciousness, you will release yourself more and more from the grip of the ego and will spend more and more time in the garden. Buddhist and other spiritual masters will ultimately even strive to leave the garden. Because their goal is the highest self, the silent consciousness. Those who leave house and garden behind overcome all wills, intentions and desires. Through a lot of mindfulness practice, the spiritual masters succeed in connecting with their highest self, the silent consciousness, and leaving every ego identification behind.
Conclusion
Painful emotions arise because we pay attention to them and believe everything in our mind without observing it from the outside. Through this clouded perspective we deny things, become greedy or confused. In total there are 10 negative states, and each is assigned a space of consciousness in which we suffer. With loving attentiveness it becomes possible to find our way out of these spaces and to enter the beautiful garden of our consciousness. The place where we feel positive emotions. With a lot of mindfulness training we can finally free ourselves from all desires and leave the garden. Then our consciousness is still and we are connected to our highest self.
Read our article, How do we make our lives better? Some ideas for practicing mindfulness.
If you want to learn more about mindfulness exercises, mindfulness worksheets, meditation techniques and guided meditations for stress reduction and anxiety. Free mindfulness exercises.