transitioning between emotional states

Sometimes I wonder why I am so bitter :). How one euphoric state, feeling of being at the top of the world can fade so quickly away and a feeling of disappointment and failure replaces it. Instantly. How ego can create both the most pleasurable and most anxious emotional reaction in my body. What irritates the ego a lot is when things do not meet the projected expectations we subconsciously conditioned our happiness to. Like the work we are going to do that is going to be amazing and it is “just ok”. Like the hike, we are going to take only to be lost in thoughts and completely forgetting we are on this journey. We are experiencing what we wanted to experience. Like a dinner, we are going to make it but it is not as we expected. Yet when we get to the point of having that fantastic experience, our ego clouds our appreciation of the present moment. That appreciation is grounded in the present moment. Not in thinking, but in being. In gratefulness for being right there! Not judging, not comparing. Just being there. It is nothing new under the sun but I try to deeply think about how can one transition from a state of feeling anxious to feeling like there is no better moment than this one. From questions of how you wanna feel, to inner stoic peace practices like virtues and things inside and outside of your control, I kind of struggle. I struggle because I feel that they are yet another manifestation of ego. Things we all rationally understand yet we are failing to practically implement them on the fly. When we need them.

So going further how can one transition a state at will? State full of identification, anxiety, and fear. Because these states come and can steal your mood for hours or days. Although I have not discovered any secret, I would love to transition into these states immediately. Maybe it is the ego again? I don’t care in this case. So the key question is how? How one transitions to this state? The best “secret” I have discovered so far is to just realize the presence by zooming in on any object around me and then zooming out by looking at the vastness around to get the perspective of now. To connect to now. This takes 10 seconds. From that zooming-in -> zooming-out moment, I transition to the feeling. I create a feeling of endless compassion for everyone in the world who is struggling but keeps going. Almost feeling deep love for others and their wounds. Their struggles. Then channeling that energy of compassion towards myself as well. It is a simple technique but for some reason, I feel it grounds me in the present moment much faster and deeper than anything else in a time when there is no time for 20 minutes of meditation to clean myself. So to summarise a simple recipe:

It does wonders. Not all the time, but I am getting close.

Amen!