Our thoughts and feelings have a unique relationship in which they can be both a cause and effect of each other. If you consciously think sad thoughts, feelings of sadness will be produced and if an already existing feeling of sadness is triggered by an external event, it will also produce thoughts of sadness.
We can get in the habit of getting caught up in our thoughts and feelings believing them to be true and fearing that they will happen. The problem with this is that we are actually feeding the cycle and adding to the intensity of the feeling with our thoughts. Imagine a thought of fear sprung to mind about an undesired future event. If we were able to abstain from feeding the fear with our thoughts, it would soon pass and we could assess the situation again with a calm logical mind. Keep in mind that most fears are extremely unrealistic and that the consequences of them, even if they do happen, are blown way out of proportion by the intensity of the fear. If we were ignorant to this or if the intensity of the fear was too strong and overwhelming to the point that our attention/focus was pulled in and we started analysing all of the different possibilities and thinking about the events that might happen or really just believing in the fear itself and believing that it could have a big impact on our lives, we would be feeding the cycle. Fears produce many thoughts and possibilities that can be frightening to the person experiencing them. When this occurs, our ability to think or reason logically is sidelined and it can all seem very real. This can cause our attention to get pulled in and when your attention is on the fear or the deluded thoughts that are being produced by it, it is sustaining the fear and adding to its intensity.
Let’s look at a simplified example to get a better understanding. Someone who has an important exam the following week in university could suddenly think, ‘what if I fail my exam?’ This could just be a thought with no charge/intensity in which case they would logically assess it and if needed, put in some extra time studying, or it could have a high charge depending on the individuals past association with their mind and fears. For this example, we’ll say that it has a medium charge to it so it would cause discomfort and their attention would be pulled towards the fearful thought. These could be some of the possible thoughts generated by the fear;
These might seem like completely illogical thoughts, which they are, but in the moment, to the person feeling the fear, they are terrifying potential possibilities. It’s when we get caught up in thoughts such as these that arise from fear, that we are feeding back into the cycle and strengthening the intensity of the feeling. It began with a thought of failing an exam and spread into thoughts of not being able to support a family or get a good job. These are much more frightening thoughts and would be sure to enhance the feeling of fear. It is easy to get caught up in this type of cycle if you are not aware of how our thoughts and feelings work or if you have a previous build up of fear in your being. A previous buildup of fears coupled with the tendency to over-identify with the mind would result in your belief and analysis of your thoughts which in turn could lead to a situation similar to the one above.
The way to deal with this is to stop feeding the cycle and let the charge behind the fear burn itself out. It simply cannot survive if it is not being sustained. So we know now that by paying attention to and believing in the thoughts that are generated by feelings feeds and strengthens them so we must withhold from doing this and allow the feelings to run their course and fade away. This can be quite a challenge if you are used to getting involved in your minds antics but once you train yourself to be able to do this, the fear (charge behind the thought) will diminish over time and fade away leaving you with the ability to logically evaluate any thought without the distortion caused by high intensity feelings.
The same applies to sadness and any other feelings. If a sad thought came to mind and we believed it to be true, we would experience a feeling of sadness which would cause a thought-feeling cycle to begin. The process is the same for sadness and all other feelings, allow them to flow without getting caught up in the thoughts behind them, this will starve the feeling of energy causing it to lose its power over you and diminish over time.
