Emotional Well Being – It`s a Choice.

Awareness allows you to sort out what you’re doing, how you feel, what you fear, hope, and wish for – indeed everything in your life. It’s tragic that so many Americans either turn their awareness off or focus it on unhappy states, such as anxiety and depression, which affect millions of people. Obesity is an unhappy state of mind just as much as an unhappy state of the body.

Awareness is turned off when you live under the following circumstances:

• You act unconsciously, following habits and rote behavior.
• You let others take charge of your life.
• You feel victimized and emotionally trapped.
• You isolate yourself and have no close connections with others.
• You act passive and resigned in the face of things that make you unhappy.
• You don’t really know what you want.

The last point is so critical that my new book What Are You Hungry For? is based on coming to a better understanding of it. You must know what you want. Otherwise, you wind up drifting. Or your life gets channeled in undesirable directions. Too many people put food into their mouths when they are hungry for attention, appreciation, love, and affection. What they really want is being redirected. The human mind is incredibly complex, but it delivers some basic states that loom over all the thoughts and feelings you have in a day, the way a marble mosaic delivers a picture rather than a jumble of tiny colored stones. The signals sent by the mind operate like the body’s signals of comfort and discomfort. When you are mentally aware, the primary signals are

• Joy/Suffering
• Love/Fear
• Compassion/Selfishness
• Peace (equanimity/ Lack of peace

On the left are the messages that lead to emotional well-being. On the right are messages that detract from well-being. You have a choice which side of the equation you want to live on. Finding well-being doesn’t happen by itself.

When you monitor the messages your mind is giving you, you are practicing self-awareness. Body awareness is also included, as it must be if your goal is to connect mind and body. Just as when you tune in to your body to receive its messages, self-awareness tunes into your inner world. Once you get into the habit, it becomes second nature.

Psychologists put labels on the obstacles that keep us from being comfortable with what our minds want to tell us: denial, repression, neurosis, obsession, anxiety – the list is quite long. But if you practice self-awareness, you can penetrate the mental fog, even if it seems thick. To take just one mental pair, let’s say you check in to see if you are experiencing love or fear. These are simple word, yet behind them lies a world of inner experience. If “love” simply meant romance and “fear” simply meant feeling terrified, most people wouldn’t gain much when they tuned in. So let’s apply more self-awareness and look at what love can be:

• Knowing that there is mutual caring: you are both loved and lovable.
• Enjoying what you’re doing
• Appreciating where you are
• Feeling good about who you are
• Having a loving, stable relationship
• Feeling that your life is vibrant and stimulating
• Experiencing a deep connection with a higher kind of love

If you pause for a moment and focus your awareness, you will know if you are experiencing these things, which make love more expansive and deeper. It’s not just about feeling romantic. People who can give positive responses to each of these things worked to get there. They wrote a life story that included love, that found the courage to look into the opposite of love, which is fear, and then make choices that led out of fear.
Fear is also more than simply feeling afraid or terrified. Fear is about

• Feeling insecure
• Not trusting what is happening
• Being afraid that you will never truly connect with others
• Seeing yourself as unworthy
• Putting yourself in the position of a victim
• Seeing no good choices, feeling helpless and powerless
• Having people who can dominate and control you
• Seeing others as “them,” your enemies or adversaries
• Being apprehensive about the future

Love solves fear. That’s why you can make choices that lead you out of fear into love. If the mind were set up a different way, love wouldn’t be the answer. Fear would be like a yellow stain on a linen napkin that you bleach out, leaving a blank. Fear is more than a stain. It’s a state of mind that blocks well-being. So well-being, including love, increases as you choose to move out of fear.