Love and Fear....

I discovered this post, I started several months ago. Clearly, sometimes I forget to come back to half started posts.  But this is a good one-too good to delete or leave in limbo. A good reminder for me and hopefully helpful to you.  

I've been a people watcher for a long time.  It's a coping mechanism for me that I learned at a young age because there was violence in my childhood home.  Kids learn to watch people and detect signs of mood swings as a way of learning how to interact socially.  Multiply this by 'n' for kids who live with domestic violence.  Learning to identify the early signs, and then to decipher triggers can powerfully and positively alter your daily life.

Because I'd developed this habit of watching and then trying to decipher the why's of the behaviors or reactions, I continued to do it even after the violence had left my day to day existence.  I still do it today.  People are fascinating.  And it's this watching, observing and consideration that brings me to this post.

We label emotions a lot of things.  Like, adoration, admiration, warmth, joy, comfort, happiness, contentment...  What I've come to believe, is that there are only 2 emotions.  Love and fear.  That's it.  

We can call it whatever we want, but either you are feeling love or you are feeling fear.  When you are feeling love, it manifests itself into a hug, or a smile or doing your work well.  When you are feeling fear, it manifests itself as jealousy, rage, depression, envy, humiliation.  

When you are on the love side, you feel good.  If you don't feel good, you are on the fear side.  Our emotions tell us whether or not we are listening to our love thoughts or listening to our fear thoughts.

I need reminding of this sometimes and like most things on this blog, this post is really a gentle reminder to myself to recognize when I'm feeling fear and to scooch right back over to the light.