Feeling Good or Feeling Bad, The Ball Is In Your Court ~ How to notice and shift your vibration
I’m not sure if you are on the same page as me when it comes to noticing vibration, but to give you a little context. When you feel good this is what we call High Vibration. Examples of High Vibration for me are, laughter, joy, excitement, passion, good health, whatever makes me feel good. Low Vibration is associated with things that don’t feel so good like, worry, doubt, frustration, fear, negativity etc… These vibrations are all around us and our bodies are very receptive to these vibrations. I’m sure you’ve heard people say, I got a good vibe from him, or I have a bad feeling about that this? There is nothing cognitive about these impressions… they are feelings felt through vibration first. We then process those feeling and put words to them so that our brains can make sense of them, so that we can communicate those ideas to others.
So now that the basics have been laid out… Do we have control over our vibration (how we feel)? And the answer is absolutely Yes. The ball is definitely in your court. But one thing to consider is that once that ball of low vibration starts moving, it gets increasingly more difficult to stop it due to its momentum. So the quicker your can realign your energies the easier it is to make the shift to start feeling good again.
Here is an example from my life of the momentum of the ball of not feeling good, picking-up speed as it rolls downhill and then a practice to help you catch yourself and shift your energy to feeling good.
On Monday I noticed that I was feeling a lot frustration and irritation… Like a dark cloud hovering above my head. Affectionately know to me and my close colleagues Marc Babineau and Karen Bonner as the Holy Shit Cloud. And until I decide to make friends with the holy shit cloud I’m going to continue to drag it around with me….grrrr! (This is a low vibrational feeling)
I thought that my shit cloud experience all started with the tantrum my daughter had that morning and the 2 hour and 30 minute adventure to get her and my son out of the house and off to daycare and it continued with a tough CrossFit workout where I behaved like a 4 year old myself . Where I had a few mini-outbursts of disgust, as I wasn’t able to complete the exercises as I would have liked. It continued with a frustrating ride home and an encounter with a bird flailing-about on the street, likely due to a collision with another car second earlier. (and for those who know me I have an affinity with nature and love to see the interaction with birds as they fly around me) So this is always a disturbing sight for me.
I then came home and continued to drag this cloud around with me. Not wanting to dwell on it yet still dragging it into my energy and thoughts. But in all honesty, this shit cloud likely formed long before my daughter’s morning tantrum. Let’s backtrack through the events of the previous hours and days back like rewinding the tape. I had a poor night sleep due to my son sleeping in our bedroom last night. He had fallen and hit his head and he needed to sleep close-by (he is okay by the way). My daughter did her best to procrastinate going to bed which fuelled my frustration…. I was unable to watch my tv show before going to bed because my daughter has control over the tv whenever she wants it….grrr… What else…, I had an amazingly frustrating cooking experience with the bbq and some fatty chicken legs. Can you say great balls of fire The chicken was burnt on the outside and raw on the inside. Prior to that, my wife and I had plans to plant the remainder of our flower and vegetable gardens, but we ran out of time to do that too…. prior to that, I had an exchange with my Mother-in-Law that really left a bad taste in my mouth. She had just returned home from a weekend away and asked me to help my Father-in-law out with a fence repair. Not knowing the extent of the repair I asked her what I should put on my feet, construction boots or running shoes? She yelled back in a frustrated tone, “Ian Use Your Head” and muttered, “never mind” as she stormed away… I think this is the piece that has left me unsettled ever since. When I think about how those comments made me feel, It brings me back to a place of feeling like I’m stupid or insufficient or not enough in someway. But all I could do at the time was complain and moan about her…. “what’s her problem…” “I don’t deserve to be spoken to this way…”
So what is going on here? Is it what she said? Is it the way I took what she said? or did I give meaning or weight to the words that she used? Essentially what did I make those words mean? This is what I mean by the title “The Ball is in your court” because it’s entirely up to me how I decide to receive this interaction with her. I internalized the words she used which I allowed to make me feel like I am not enough… I’m not excusing entirely what she said to me, but I was the one who internalized those words to mean something other than what she said. She never said “Ian you are not good enough and you are stupid”? She was likely already feeling some frustration from something else and I was drop that overflowed her bucket of frustration. But, I let it effect me and I have let that vibration of feeling not so good become my way of being over the past 24 hours or so. So what can I do about it?
Well use me as an example. If you want to change your vibration you can try and focus on what good things are happening around you. This can be very affective if the ball of not feeling good is in the early stages of moving. However, that will only work if you have caught the ball before it picked-up too much speed. If the momentum of bad feeling vibration has built-up for a while like a snowball rolling down the hill, you may need to take a step back to find the triggering incident and then ask yourself some important questions. Questions like… What happened when I started feeling not so good? Who was there? What was said? How did it make me feel? What did I do about it? What would I like to do about it? And how can I catch myself faster next time so that I don’t carry that cloud with me. The key here is identifying the trigger so that you can stop that snowball rolling before it picks-up the speed and becomes an avalanche.
Usually this step of asking myself questions is enough for me to feel the transition from feeling bad to feeling good, because I have removed the emotional trigger from the equation. And because I know that I am ‘enough’ and that I am ‘smart’, the rest of the negative energy seems to melt away.
Next, I asked myself if I need to do something or have a conversation with anyone to make peace with the events that happened while I was affected by my cloud. And in this case, the trigger and frustration was mine and no one else’s. That said, I did apologize to a few people who I felt that I had affected by my attitude and behaviour over the past 24 hours.
So What’s next…. Well I know I have a trigger of being ’Not Enough’. So the next time I get triggered and notice that I don’t feel good. I can rewind that tape sooner to ask myself those few questions that release the bad feeling vibration and I can then focus on what is important to me which is feeling good and focusing on what is working well in my life. Which in all honesty is 99.9% of what is showing-up in my life all the time. The flip side however is that when you focus on the 0.1% sometimes that’s all we can see. So the moment you flip that switch to what is working everything seems to brighten-up and the sun begins to shine again.
So to recap, if you want to shift your vibration to a better feeling place follow these steps
Step 1 – Notice when you are in your Holy Shit Cloud!
Step 2a – Focus on the areas of your life that are going well and not what is frustrating you. If this doesn’t work… go to step 2b
Step 2b – Rewind the tape to find the moment that your vibration changed (this could be days ago…)
Step 3 – Ask yourself the questions to find out what actually happened in that moment and what you made it mean
Step 4 – Decide if there is anything for you to do, whether that’s a conversation with someone or a task to do
Step 5 – Identify the trigger that sets you off, so that you can recognize it before the bad feeling momentum gets rolling
If you found this article helpful or have questions please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below
Until my next twinge of inspiration strikes…take care
Ian
