Control Your Reactions – and Determine Your Destination

By Deborah Fairfull 

One minute you can be traveling along feeling peaceful and loving towards yourself and the world – then you meet someone, they say something and the next minute you’ve been completely taken away from your peace. At this point you have a choice: you can blame the other person or use your reaction as a learning opportunity to grow and learn to experience your world in a more peaceful and loving way.

To do this, it is important to be able to begin to understand your inner world in terms of your thoughts and feelings. This involves developing skills to observe your thoughts and feelings — which are actually the same thing — rather than being swept away by them. Your thoughts determine how you feel; for example, if you are thinking “I love my life” on a regular basis, you are likely to feel great. However, if you were repeatedly thinking, “life is a struggle,” you would quite possibly feel sad or even depressed.

When you develop the ability to observe your reactions and thoughts in a loving way they will begin to flow energetically through your body. It is as if you are the chariot driver, your feelings are the chariot and the horses are your thoughts. As the chariot driver you want to be in charge of the horses, otherwise they can run away and you can end up in undesirable situations.

Your reactions are a wonderful guide to what is really going on in your inner world. Very strong feelings are involved in reactions, which are brain responses associated with survival. Reactions are caused by a small nut-shaped structure in the brain, known as the amygdala, which scans the environment for signs of danger. It is associated with emotions such as fear, rage, anger, and fight or flight. If the amygdala senses danger, it will signal the body to either act aggressively (fight) or withdraw (flight). The fight response manifests in things such as road rage, saying things you don’t mean and later wishing you could take it back, while flight may make you feel “frozen,” unable to find the right words to say.

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Read the full article, and others like it at: http://edgemagazine.net/2011/12/control-your-reactions/