2. What if I struggle and struggle and seem to get nowhere?

So much of our time is spent trying to keep the “good” feelings and thoughts and avoid the "bad" feelings and thoughts. But what if thoughts and feelings are a bit more like spinning the ‘roulette wheel’ in the picture below? We want to keep landing on a ‘good’ space, but moment to moment, life often has other ideas……

The feel good game

So what if it’s like this….You’ve been spending a lot of time at the ‘gambling table’ pictured above, waiting for the good thoughts and feelings to come and stay for good so you can get on with life. And, like the rest of us, your mind keeps telling you that that the good thoughts and feelings have to come and stay for good in order for you to live a good life. But think back to what you found out by completing the exercises in the previous section. All in all, have you been winning this ‘Feel Good” game? And since you’ve been playing it, has your life become more joyful, open, and meaningful? Or more confined and less meaningful?

If you haven’t been winning this game, you’re not alone. In fact, everyone we know personally (including us) isn’t winning this particular game either. But what if you don’t have to win the game—the “Feel Good” game? What if our minds have tricked us into thinking that we have to feel good before we live well, before we can really feel alive and do things that really matter to us?

What if you can leave the “Feel Good” game behind and start playing the “Live Well” game instead? And what if it actually turns out that you can live well even when you don’t feel good? We’re not asking you to believe this now; we’re just asking you to notice how well your “Feel Good” game has been going. And if it’s not going well, we’re asking you to try something completely different.

We’ll talk a lot more about what it might mean for you to Live Well even when you don’t ‘feel good’. But before we do that, let's consider what happens if we let go of the struggle to ‘feel good’. Click on the link below to try an exercise that will show you first hand.

Creative letting go exercise (audio)