A non-reactive mindset

It’s difficult not to react to things. Something happens that we think shouldn’t happen and we get an emotional reaction. The emotions translate either into thoughts or actions. And we end up making things worse, either on the inside or the outside. On the inside by suppressing them so that they get stored inside the body as tension. Or on the outside by acting on them and thereby for example get into conflicts or break things.

We cannot choose how we feel. But we can choose what we think and how we act. We can choose actively to bring awareness and acceptance into what is happening in the moment, both inside ourselves and outside ourselves. And this, in turn, will affect our emotions.

I think that fear is the root of the negative emotions. Fear is reactive. Love is proactive. When I for example get angry, I’m really afraid that I will get hurt or that I won’t have my needs met. If something for example breaks, it triggers a whole cascade of different fears. Fear that it will waste my time so that I won’t manage to do things in time, fear that I won’t afford to fix or replace it and that I won’t have the things that I need in order. These are of course my fears that get triggered. Yours might be different. And it can often be difficult to know why we feel what we feel before we have started to think consciously about it. An interesting thing is that just by thinking consciously about something we start changing it.

The point is that I can choose if I want to feed this emotional state with my thoughts and actions or not.

When we primarily just react to things we also become predictable. And this, I believe, is worth thinking about. Because right now algorithms predict our online behavior and provide us with stimuli to manipulate us. But I truly believe that if we start living in the now, from a place of conscious awareness, make proactive choices instead of reactive ones and are clear about our values and why we have them, we diminish the chance of machines turning us into robots. Because we are truly wonderful, glorious children of God, destined to walk freely together with our loving creator. 

And conscious awareness is key here. The more we become aware of our actions and take responsibility for our unconscious behavior, the better we will become at getting out of our reactive mindsets. We must not allow our thoughts to provide us with nonsensical explanations of our reactive behaviors. Rather, we need to se these behaviors for what they are. A non-reactive mindset really doesn’t take any effort to cultivate. But we need to keep reminding us of it over and over again. This is the key. To remember to not get swept up in unconsciousness.