Keep Telling Yourself How Good You Feel

“Keep Telling Yourself How Good Your Feel” was written and recorded by guest contributor, Samuel Kronen.

No matter what it is that we are contending with in life, whether it be illness, tragedy, or just a kind of general angst and malaise, I’ve found it vitally important to continually remind myself that I have the intrinsic capacity to navigate and augment my emotional state.

I wake up some days and I can barely get out of bed. My bones feel like granite, and every little movement feels like I’m shuffling through quicksand. My head aches with a kind of stifling pain that throbs with each motion, as if some psychopathic sadist is in charge of modulating my nervous system. My neck feels as though it has been pummeled with a wooden bat for twelve hours by Babe Ruth’s pissed off cousin juiced to the gills on mexican supplements.

I’ve been dealing with a series of deeply rooted chronic infections on and off for a number of years now, and through and through the pervading theme has been a near constant state of debilitation and dis-ease.. which, might I add, has been a total bummer.

Yet, amidst the horror of my illness there has come to exist some light gradually penetrating through the shadow, a subtle emanation of joy breaching the vast darkness of it all.

I am happy. I like my life.

Now, it seems fairly clear to me that much of the quality of our states of being correlates directly to the conversation that is happening in our heads, and in that it is possible to adjust and improve how we feel simply by tuning into our thoughts, or rather reassessing the kind of internal dialogue we are having with ourselves.

Basically what I mean to say is that what we think, we feel. Our thoughts and our feelings are deeply interconnected, and in recognizing this fully we surely put ourselves in a position to optimize our state of being, to make ourselves feel good in spite of what we are contending with externally.

The conversation in our heads seems to dictate how we feel about ourselves, how we feel about others, and how we feel about the world at large. For me, when this conversation changed its tone, began to sound more benevolent and righteous, the quality of my life and my relationship to my illness completely altered.

When I wake up, in spite of how I feel physically, I tell myself how good of a day I’m going to have, how grateful I am to wake up in this bed, and how good of a job I’m doing. In essence, I tell myself how good I feel.

Okay, so I’m not really a woo woo mystical person, though, I maintain that simply reassessing the manners in which we think has a tremendous impact on our capacities and how we move through the world.

In other words, perspective is choice.

When we choose a more positive perspective, perceive our disposition more kindly and with a sense of grace, then we tend to feel substantially better.

I’m not saying that we should ignore our negative thoughts and emotions, for of course it is important to absorb and wholly accept whatever it is we are dealing with. I’m not talking about some kind of suppression or denial, rather I mean to bring light to the simple fact that our thoughts come to dictate our actions.

This isn’t some life hack. This isn’t some new age trickery. This is merely a matter of convincing ourselves what is already true; that truth being that we are always capable of persevering through our respective suffering.

When we feel nervous, afraid, or in pain, let’s just try bringing our attention to the movement of our thoughts and see if it is possible to elicit a sense positivity and optimism that up until that point was obscured by skewed and disjointed thought patterns.

(To see more of Samuel’s articles and videos, click here)

I feel that when I cease to engage in this practice, my mind seems to convince me (or at least attempts to) that things are worse than they are, that it is not going to be okay, that there is some kind of inherent problem present here.

Life is confusing.

There’s a lot happening, and it is happening all at once. It is just an inescapable fact that most of us are going to get bogged down at one point or another, disheartened by the unimaginable weight of this absurd universe. That being said, it is indeed possible to optimize our state of being so as to mitigate the madness, so as to reduce angst and cognitive dissonance as much as possible, and I’ve just presented one manner to do so.

Think of it as a kind of uplifting self-manipulation, but a manipulation that oddly aligns us with the truth that we have what it takes.. We have what it takes to transcend our negative circumstances.

We don’t need to be profoundly sick or dealing with some life crisis so as to make this useful, rather it is a tool we can use readily and steadily throughout our day to day lives. This life is short, so let’s feel as good as possible and live out our truest and most authentic selves while we’re here. One step in doing so is to keep telling ourselves how good we feel no matter what difficulties are presented to us, to keep asserting that we are capable of overcoming the resistance that we are faced with.

When we continually remind ourselves of the infinite capacities embedded in the very fabric of human consciousness, then the possibilities are endless.