How can you change a feeling?

Don't you hate it when someone tells you to stop being jealous? To not be angry? To just feel thankful? To stop feeling attracted to the wrong person???


Sure, it's easy for them to say, it's easy for anyone to say, but how do you stop yourself feeling a feeling? You see someone with the thing you badly want...is it possible to just flick a switch and not want it? Somebody insults you...can you just ignore the feeling of wanting to throw a chair at them? Can you just turn your feelings off? Well, I guess you probably can, but that's called apathy and that's a whole other issue. 


What I've learned is that maybe you can't stop yourself feeling the feelings and maybe, really...maybe it's not wrong to feel them. I suppose it's more about what you do with them. Is it wrong for me to feel jealousy? Maybe not. Is it wrong for me to ignore or abuse the person I'm jealous of? Of course! Is it wrong for me to be angry when someone offends me? Nope. Is it wrong for me to actually throw a chair at them? I probably don't need to answer that. 


I've also learned that you can flip that theory around. Take gratitude. Can you make yourself feel thankful? I think you can. Because I think that sometimes, if you do what you would do when you felt what you should feel, you can start to feel that way.

When I used to feel jealous, in the worst times, when I actually felt like I was in pain from my lack of what others had, I would say to myself over and over, “my cup overflows, MY cup overflows”, but at that stage they were just words. I was so easily blinded. I didn’t see the friends I had as blessings, I didn’t appreciate my dad, my mum, my sister, I wouldn’t recognise what a gift it was to have the ability and the means to go to university to study a degree that could get me a good career. I expected the gratitude to just descend on me and change my thinking instantly.

But I’ve come to learn that it takes practise. So, although I didn't feel thankful, I started being thankful. And not just generally, not just, “thank you for my friends, thank you for my family, thank you for helping me study”, but specifics. “Thank you for that time when Cat plastered my room with encouraging verses, thank you that my mum will drive for 2 hours to pick me up from the airport, thank you for that letter from Lynne that came at exactly the right time.”

I found it pretty amazing how quickly the feeling of gratitude grew and the feeling of jealousy shrank when I started to do what I would do...

 ...if the gratitude was what I felt.