Does your life feel the way you want it to feel? Are you
fulfilled and happy? Does your life feel meaningful to you? These kinds of questions address the underlying feelings that run our lives.
Most of us identify with our ego mind. We think our thoughts define us and our lives are run by the choices we make. We hear about the importance of positive thinking and the awesome power of the mind. From this we conclude that we should be able to control our lives and make things around us be the way we want. We expend endless hours trying to control the people and things around us in an effort to make our life be better. We want to take control of our universe.
Most people I know have trouble making this desire work out the way they want. They have this trouble because their basic understanding of how things work is flawed. The greater truth is that we are not our ego mind and it does not control our life. Our feeling self is in fact in charge. If you doubt this then watch how long anyone will keep making ego based choices that don’t provide the feeling payoff they are looking for. Ego exists to meet our feeling needs. It is the physical world interface tool our feeling self has for navigating the world of three-dimensional form.
So lets look at things from a different perspective – one that will give us a much better shot at getting control of our universe.
First of all, what is our universe? Our universe is the space between our ears. It is not the people and things in the outer world around us. The outer world serves us to reflect us back to us. We can not see our feeling selves directly. We see our feeling self in how we feel about things around us. Our feelings about things are not character qualities of the things themselves, but feelings we attach to them because of reasons of our own. As Shakespeare once wrote in the play Hamlet, “…there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” I would point out that it is feeling that makes it so – thinking is more about the story we invent to justify or explain the feeling we have.
For many years the false belief has been that feelings come from the thoughts we have about things. The whole field of talk psychology is based on this belief. The problem is this is false. Once science was able to actually measure in minute detail exactly what is happening in our brains when we think and feel, they discovered that feelings happen before thoughts do. That is why trying to stop feelings through talking is largely a waste of time. So taking control of our universe has to begin with impacting how we feel about everything.
Feelings are relationships. They are a product of who we are in relationship to the something we have a feeling about. Life just is. Everything in our life is simply what it is. How we relate to each thing is a product of how we feel about our self and the skills we have in relating to what is. When we are unhappy with some aspect of our life, it is because we either do not feel good about ourselves or we have ineffective skills for relating to that part of our life. The mistake we always seem to make is wanting to believe that the problem is with the person or thing in our outer world that we perceive as the problem. If only they or it were different – the way we want – then we would feel fine. That does not actually say anything meaningful – just that if whatever brought up the bad feelings in us went away, then the bad feelings would go away. Maybe or maybe not, but that does not address why we felt bad, and as a result we will keep encountering similar situations in the future.
Feeling good is about upgrading us. Upgrading us is 
about loving ourselves more. The better we feel about ourselves the greater the range of skills we have access to.
Love is the opposite of fear. When we are in fear our skills for relating to life narrow down to the basics programmed into our reptilian brain stem – fight, flight, and freeze. These responses are automatically tied to feelings of alarm and anxiety – not good feelings. Put simply, love feels good and fear feels bad. If we want to gain control of our universe – meaning have the ability to get the feelings we want in our world, we begin by building the feelings of love – for ourselves and then for life.
Allow me to pause for a moment to consider another misunderstanding many people have about getting what they want in life. Because they believe happiness comes from things and people being the way they want rather than just themselves feeling the way they want, they spend the bulk of their daily energy on trying to gain 
power over everything. Power is a deceptive tool. Power only has the ability to inhibit, never to create. With enough power, you can make anyone stop being ways that upset you. But no matter how much power you have you can never make someone be something they are not. You can not make pigs fly or rainbows cough up with pots of gold. Power can not make you a great artist nor a good person. Power is a tool of fear, not of love.
The power to inhibit is the power of the ego mind. When you are born all your brain cells are “on.” The growth of the brain from birth onward is all about the growth of the type of brain cells that inhibit the “on” brain cells. The development of our identity as ego is actually the development of our ability to inhibit ourselves.
Creating the life you want is like painting a picture. You have a blank canvas in front of you and a pallet full of colors in your hand. With your ego you can inhibit – decide what colors you do not want to use. But if all you do is inhibit, nothing will ever get put on that canvas. Your picture will be a big blank. Fear makes your life a big blank. Love is the “on” feeling that says “I want to participate with life.” Love engages and accepts relationship with life. Love says “yes.” Creating your life requires you to love. You have to love a color and choose to put it on your canvas – then another and another and so on until you have created the picture of the life you want. You can not create the life you want by trying to simply make the unwanted stuff go away. The more your energy is spent suppressing the things you don’t want, the more unwanted things will appear in your life. What you focus your energy of attention on determines the course of your life. Life is relationship and relationships that fill the deeper feeling needs we have are based in love.
So what do you do with all the things in life that feel bad? We have been convinced that we need to “work out our issues” with these things. After years and years of working out issues in myself and others I can confidently say that this does not work. Issues never end. What does work is replacing the unpleasant relationship with a more pleasant relationship. Stop trying to “fix” problems. Change yourself relative to the problem. Embrace yourself and love yourself more until you feel so good about yourself that you automatically form a 
different relationship with the problem. The more confident, relaxed, centered, and loving you feel, the greater the options you will find you have for relating to things. This is how you actually “solve” problems – you rise above the problem level to embrace a new and better relationship.
Everyone has a laundry list of bad things that have happened to them in their past. Well the past is gone. What is still impacting you today is not the story of what happened, but the false conclusions you made about how lovable you are. Bad things are bad simply because they convinced you to stop loving yourself. Let go of the lies those events planted in your brain and reawaken the self-appreciation and joyful love for yourself that got dimmed by those events. As you do this your life will blossom.
Life is a reflection of our relationship to ourselves. Life is simply a mirror in which we are able to see how we feel about ourselves. How we feel about others mirrors how we feel about some parts of ourselves. Our experience with life is really just our experience of how well we relate to and love ourselves. So if you want to grab control of your universe and create the life of your dreams, the journey begins and ends in caring for yourself. To experience joy in your outer world, you have to experience the joy of being yourself and loving that experience. The good you feel in the world is merely the good in you reflecting back to you. If you want a good life, be a good person. To be a good person you have to see and feel the good in yourself. Embrace your goodness.
All the saints and spiritual gurus have said that happiness is an inside job. They failed to say that it comes from something as simple as self love and is experienced in loving life. We receive what we give – to ourselves and to others. The more we give love, the more we attract love into our lives.