කොහෙද

One of the surprising things I've learnt this year is that I can actually change the way I feel by thinking about it. I'm not at the mercy of my own mind as I have felt so many times in the past and I don't absolutely need some kind of medication. In the past that seemed like the only real solution - medication or alcohol. 

It seemed too hard and my rumination seemed too powerful, to change my thinking. But this year there have been times when, just by thinking, I was able to feel better. 

I don't understand feelings in the way that some people seem to and the way some psychology books do (e.g. The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris). According to this notion, feelings are always sensations somewhere in the body. To me that makes no sense. It's just not true. Someone once asked me about certain feelings I was describing, where are they in your body? The thing is, they aren't. To me, my feelings are tied in with my thoughts. Like, for example if I feel pleasure or I feel happy, they aren't sensations in my body, they are things I'm thinking about. Someone might argue that what I'm thinking about that's making me happy is in my mind, but the actual feeling is in my body, but that's a really weird concept to me and doesn't seem true. 

To me, my emotions are part of a kind of inner landscape and that inner landscape exists in my mind. I can entertain that other view of feelings. To do some of the techniques Russ Harris talks about in The Happiness Trap, you have to play along with that idea, so I do, but it seems kind of artificial. Like, I'm aware that the whole thing is happening in my mind anyway. So, he says, identify where a troubling feeling is in your body and then imagine that there's a space around it for it to expand into. (I might have got that slightly wrong as it's been a while since I read the book, but it's something along those lines). So, first of all, I don't have an awareness of where the feeling is in my body, but I do my best. I identify where it might be. Then, I imagine a space around that, etc. But because I don't actually feel it in my body, the action is really happening in my mind. I just can't relate to this idea that an emotion is a sensation in my body. Russ Harris insists that that's what all feelings are, and to me that seems like such a weird concept.