I often find myself full with strong feelings like anxiety or anger and even the most insignificant things can trigger an inappropriate response full of rage from my behalf. As I pointed in an older post, to get in control of my emotions I have to get in control of my thoughts. The process of monitoring and understanding our own thoughts is called introspection.
Letting our own thoughts change our mood as they please is like driving a car without knowing how to drive. With introspection we learn how to drive our moods, but instead of keeping the mind empty (like in meditation), we let our mind go full with everything and we just sit back and watch carefully. It is recommended to note every little thing, but it might not be easy, at least, not at the beginning. Letting our mind go wild from time to time is also useful because we train ourselves to let everything in when we want, not when our unconscious self decides to. You can find more about this here.
The better we understand ourselves, the better we can understand the world and this is the path for success and happiness. Getting in control of our thoughts will empty some space in our minds and we can keep a closer look at everything around us and that will help us better understand everything. The more we understand, the more prepared we’ll be for situations that might appear. Understanding the world will create realistic expectations and that will reduce the amount of disappointments we’ll encounter.
Introspection also is a way to find and set free some dark feelings that we keep buried deep in ourselves. Our fear of pain makes us ignore painful thoughts and the more we bury, the heavier we feel. The pain is there, we just ignore it and the more we ignore, the stronger it gets and it will find a way to come out and express itself. Yes, it will hurt, but it’s better to let it free when we encounter it than to bury lots of it and when it gets too much to handle, it breaks us down.
If we understand ourselves, we can find out how we can make ourselves happy. Isn’t this the whole point?