"Don't demand or expect
that events happen
as you wish them to.
Accept events
as they actually happen.
That way, peace is possible."
-- Epictetus
You're focused on doing something that is inviting your attention. It might be facebook, working on a project, researching something, writing something, whatever. You feel the urge to pee. You don't want to stop. You want to keep going. But, it has dropped from your bladder to the final gateway to freedom. You try to ignore it. It's getting harder to focus. You try to use mind over matter and push it back into the bladder, but it has a will stronger than yours. You cross your legs, tap your feet, and you continue to try to focus. You want to get this done and getting up is such an inconvenience right now. You're on a roll. But now, the final gate is feeling like Hoover Dam about to break. Finally, you get up and go let go of it muttering under your breath the whole way to the bathroom. Then, after the gates have released the pressure, you feel normal again. You even feel energized. You feel relief. You feel good.
All of that resistance to getting up and going to the bathroom is frustration. The best definition of frustration I've seen is that frustration is wanting things to be different than they are. Frustration is a negative emotional response to how we are thinking about a situation in a given time. Most of my life, I just thought it was normal. As I look around me, I see that it certainly is common.
Our frustration can cause us to focus on this thing that is happening that we do not want, creating deeper frustration, with thoughts added to by the Law of Attraction, and we may often find more negative emotions to deal with. On Abraham's Emotional Scale, frustration is at 10 of the 22 spots. Below frustration is some common emotions you may recognize, such as overwhelment, disappointment, doubt, worry, blame, discouragement, anger (been there a few times. . .).
How many times have you been frustrated and seen these other emotions coming around? Going down the emotional scale will keep us in a funk affecting much of what we are trying to do, and it certainly messes with our enjoyment.
The best thing is to recognize this frustration emotion, realize that you are feeling and talking about that with others or within yourself. Then, you have the power to move up the Emotional Scale rather than down it. It's only a couple of steps to contentment, then next is hope. Once you get to hope, the rest of the journey is easy. Skip right through optimism right into enthusiasm, and back into your joy. Or, stay where you are and do it the way you want. It's all a choice each of us has. And, once you get to this place of knowing that you have this power over your environment, you will find it nearly impossible to go back to your ignorance of it.
I think the thing that I wanted to change in my life the most was to get the hell away from frustration. It felt totally crappy. I tried like all get out to change the circumstances--to push against that thing or the other that I imagined was creating this negative situation, but that offered little in the way of progress.
Then there was one more thing that got in the way. I used to use my frustration about circumstances, events, and other people as an excuse to not do something I didn't want to do. Since it is such a common thing in our lives, people relate to and give sympathy and otherwise understand how you can be so upset that you can't do this thing, or go somewhere, etc. Hey, after all, it happens to everyone, right?
Since I have learned this Emotional Scale thing from Abraham and Esther Hicks in the book, Ask and It Is Given, I feel so empowered and so confident that even though I may feel a negative emotion, I realize that it is the guidance for me rather than trying to bring me down. Instead of that feeling being negative in my life, it becomes a positive, because knowing what I don't want and realizing that this is what I am thinking about, I know better what I do want: I want to feel good. Then, I make a decision to find a better feeling thought, then another, and so on until I am feeling good. I can now do that very quickly, sometimes in just a few seconds, other times it takes maybe minutes.
I see people frustrated at work, at home, with their spouses, in business dealings, in politics--in fact, in every point of our lives. I've experienced it in all of them. We can keep doing that, or do something about it. Whatever choice anyone makes is fine, but there are choices other than frustration.
My Choice Is To Feel Good. How About You?
Spread Some Joy Today--by taking the time to find out how to have it more often.
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