There are two necessary ingredients to changing or evolving ourselves and they go together like hand in glove:  honest self-observation and an ability to feel our feelings.

In order to make a choice for something better you must honestly look at how you function in the world.  Personal evolution does not occur by chance.  Life could be likened to a school in which you learn through experience what choices lead to what outcomes.  The great tragedies of Shakespeare show a person compelled by their personality to an inevitable tragic outcome.  But, is it inevitable?  Only if they don’t make a different choice.  Can you make a different choice?  Of course—what would be the point of life if you could not?  Or, to put it another way, if you cannot make another choice you are a puppet or a robot controlled by the circumstances of your birth.

So, honest self-observation is necessary to evolution.  Ramana Marharshi called it self-inquiry.  It is an act of contemplation, which is observation with an open and curious mind and without judgment, evaluation, justification or denial.  It is a deep looking with a desire to see things as they are.

One starts with a willingness to look at oneself.  Then one develops the ability to see.  This is a skill that is developed by use.  There are common activities that support the development of being the observer.  A few of these are psychotherapy, journaling and meditation. A pitfall of psychotherapy is that one can get caught in reciting one’s story and this does not go very far.  Matter of fact, it can be detrimental by enhancing the role of victim.  How you developed the way you are is actually unimportant except insofar as it helps inform you what emotions you have to evolve and what ideas you hold about yourself.

Journaling can be a way to develop the role of the observer of one’s life and has the advantage of being a very inexpensive self-development tool. Meditation is the practice of sitting and noticing whatever thoughts or feelings are coming into mind without getting lost in them.  (Of course, one does, and gently pulls oneself back out, over and over until one does it less and less.)   There are also people who find that some physical activity such as yoga, swimming or walking can facilitate noticing thoughts without becoming involved in them.  It is necessary to not get involved with the thoughts and feelings.  Being the thought or feeling is not the same as observing the thought or feeling.  Also, thinking is not observing and observing is not thinking.

The second quality necessary for personal evolution is an ability to feel ones feelings.  I believe that it is essentially our unwillingness to feel our feelings or emotions that keep us stuck and not evolving.  We live in a society that denigrates feelings or at least the “negative” feelings and often we are told that what we feel is not right.  Therefore, from an early age we feel bad about what we feel and do our best to avoid feeling.  However, what we feel is what we feel.  There is nothing right or wrong about it.  We came by our feelings honestly.

We have many ways to avoid feeling our feelings.  The primary way that we avoid our feelings is to act them out.  When we act them out we are not feeling them.  When we act them out it is like a reflex that does not go to the brain for consideration.  You are driving down the highway and someone going slower pulls in front of you.  You honk, you raise your fist, give them a finger or scream epithets.  In acting out our frustrations we are energizing the emotion and actually growing it.  Our subconscious is listening to us and it will offer us more frequently whatever we feel passionate about.  If we feel the feeling of frustration but do not react to it, merely holding it in our awareness, we deactivate or de-energize the feeling.  When we live our life reacting to our feelings we are actually allowing them to push us around and run our life.  We are not in charge—our program is in charge.  We are asleep at the wheel.

There are many other ways that we avoid our feelings.  There are the classic addictions of drugs and alcohol.  People want to change how they feel and they have found that these substances change the way they feel so well that the substances can become very compelling to some.  However, there are many more addictions that are either more socially acceptable or not noticed as addictions:  working too much, shopping too much, vomiting, eating to excess or certain types of foods, watching TV too much or playing games to excess, having sex too much and isolating to avoid stimulating feelings to name just a few.  When feelings are avoided and not felt they are kept.  They are kept in an unusable state.  They are energy that is locked up and stored.  It is like fat in the body that grows and grows and is not burned or used for any practical purpose.  Feelings evolve in being felt without judgment.  By the way, hating what you feel is not feeling what you feel—it is hating and another way of avoiding feeling.

Part of what makes feelings so pesky is that we believe them.  We think they are telling us truth.  However, they are not telling the “truth” of the present, they are telling the “truth” of the past.  All feelings come from the past except for those absolutely new experiences that we have as we are growing up and very occasionally throughout our adult life.  Once we have had the experience, every repetition and every variation of the same generates feelings from the past.  Avoiding “bad” feelings is keeping them and pursuing “good” feelings over and over is an addiction and wears out the body.  So, what is a body to do?  Our task is to feel what we feel without judgment thereby deactivating or de-energizing all feelings.  As we deactivate the feelings they no longer dominate our life.  As a situation comes up before us we are able to notice what we feel and also bring our logic to bear on the decision making of the situation.  This then makes it easier and easier to not react to our feelings but to notice them and use them for information only.  As we no longer react to our feelings they gradually recede into the background (through transformation) and the bliss of our natural state of being gradually comes forward to our awareness.

I admit that it can be painful to notice how you function in the world if you don’t know what to do about it but sometimes all that is necessary is to notice with keen focus and desire along with an idea of how you’d like to be instead for a change to occur in the subconscious mind.  Fortunately, there are more and more tools being developed to provide people with a way to change and heal themselves.  Some of these tools are:  PSYCH-K, EFT, The Healing Code, Reconnective Healing, The Sedona Method, Open-Focus, The Work, various self-hypnosis practices and many more.  The method that I like, that I use, is PSYCH-K.  In using these processes one gradually learns that one is able to change whatever one can see so that observing oneself becomes an adventure rather than a painful experience.  There are also ways with PSYCH-K to aid feeling one’s feelings to gradually de-energize them, transforming the emotion into energy that can be used for other creative work.