Row, Row, Row Your Boat!
In this article Life Coach Swarnali Dey shares the recipe for happiness. She advises us to row our own boat of life by being ourselves and not by carrying other’s negativity.
Recently, I came across a phrase while I was in a group activity and our facilitator said, “Replace Losing with Releasing.” It was a new statement for me and so I tried to understand the meaning of this in my own life. And it resonated so strongly, so much so that, I started trying to see most of the difficult situation in my life through the essence of this phrase. I can so strongly connect with this phrase in my day-to-day life that I decided to elaborate on it.
We, as human beings, as emotional creatures, are always afraid to lose. Afraid of losing marks in exams, afraid of a dating experience going wrong, afraid of not landing up in a good job, afraid of losing friends, afraid of being misunderstood, afraid of losing our partners, afraid of losing our dear ones, afraid about our child’s future and today there is also something called FOMO-Fear of missing out!!!!
We are just so afraid all the time in our lives…even the silliest of things make us afraid of losing something or the other. We spend so much time in being afraid that we eventually forget to enjoy the very basic pleasures of life…this being our very existence, of us being alive and healthy.
It might seem a very daunting task to do away with the feeling of fear since we have been cultivating this feeling since our very childhood. However, we need to reflect and evaluate as to what this feeling of fear has actually provided us with…Stress? Loss of focus? Limiting our own horizons? Unnatural bodily reactions? There might be a lot of things that the feeling of fear gives rise to, both mentally as well as physically…the one thing for certain, it gives rise to, is a NEGATIVE feeling.
A little bit of fear, here and there, is welcome, but continuously managing our lives based on fear definitely gives rise to stress. If we can start to replace that feeling of fear of losing with the idea of releasing….it will eventually help us to handle different situations in our lives in a far better manner. It will lessen our stress, the negative feeling, the bad mood, the sadness!
Anything that costs us our mental health is too expensive. Mental health is fundamental to our collective and individual ability as humans to think, emote, interact with each other, earn a living and enjoy life. It is a state of well-being in which an individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.
When we wake up in the morning, we have to wake up with a purpose. We can’t let the fear of endless number of situations in our lives decide the course of our day. We can’t just wake up and wait and let the day unfold…we can’t just wait and see what kind of day we will have. We have to decide what kind of day we want to have.
It is essential to go beyond our fears and stop being afraid and design our own day. We have to have higher thoughts which will lead to higher energy leading to higher vibrations, higher frequencies which will provide the higher experiences devoid of fear or negative emotions. This is how we start releasing…in small ways, on a day-to-day basis.
However, negative emotions are not to be avoided. Anger, frustration, fear, and other ‘negative emotions’ are all parts of the human experience. They can all lead to stress and are often seen as emotions to be avoided. But the best way to approach these negative emotions is to manage them without denying them.
Managing negative emotions doesn’t mean avoiding it. It also doesn’t mean letting these negative emotions wreak havoc on our lives, relationships and stress levels. For example, unmanaged anger can compel us to destroy our relationships, if we allow it to.
Our emotions are designed to be messengers to tell us something. These messages can be very valuable in managing our negative emotions. Managing negative emotions is more about embracing the fact that we are feeling them, determining why we are feeling this way, and allowing ourselves to receive the messages that they are sending us before we release them and move forward. It also means not to allow these emotions to overrun us.
Basically, all of our emotional upsets are caused by lack of harmony, imbalances and unresolved issues, from our past or present, in the emotional body. The surprising fact is ,98 percent of that upset is what we pick up from other people. Yes!!! We pick up other people’s feelings, thoughts and emotions all of the time.
Our body is an amazing energy-sensing machine and has its own consciousness. It is designed to give us sensory input, but most people don’t even realize that they’re taking on someone else’s ‘upset’.Since we were in the womb, we have been a sponge that pick up the energy around us all of the time.
Ponder and reflect,if we have ever been referred to as too sensitive? This sensitivity is actually our gift, our ability-only if we realise that we are to use this ability to benefit ourselves first, and our mental peace, to create our own happiness. And to do this, we constantly need to ask ourselves a very important question- “Who does this emotion belong to?” The moment we know the answer, we will realise that it is not worth our time and energy to focus on somebody else’s negative emotions and disrupt our own peace of mind.
The simple technique is to consciously release those toxic environment, toxic people from our sphere of conscience and start focussing on self-love. Why self-love? Because, in all these negativities we tend to somehow blame ourselves for allowing the situation to happen.
Hence, we also need to forgive ourselves and focus more on developing our own strengths and goodness. Goodness doesn’t mean allowing people to trample upon us. Goodness means being good to ourselves first. There’s an old adage which says-‘If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love anybody else.’ So, Self-Love, Self-Love, Self-Love is the key!
We all want to be perfect in our various roles in our lives. Look at it this way… we don’t need to be perfect- we just need to be authentic. We just need to focus on our progress only. We only need to use language to communicate, not impress! Next time, anyone throws a label at us, the answer should be, “YES, THAT’S ME EXACTLY. THANK YOU FOR NOTICING.”
We need to row our own boat only. We are not meant to carry other’s negative feelings towards us as a yardstick for our lives. We need to set boundaries so that we can release our fears and stride towards our own betterment and fulfilment. The nursery rhyme ‘Row, row, row your boat’ probably has to be experienced from this perspective today.
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