When you’re in the middle of an experience you don’t prefer, try saying this out loud:

“I feel frustration because I choose to believe I need to.”

“I feel stress because I choose to believe it’s necessary.”

“I feel anger because I choose to believe I must.”

“I feel hate because I believe it’s required.”

“I feel fear because I believe it’s inevitable.”

“I feel sadness because I choose to believe my experience is sad.”

You can swap out the ending to “Because I believe I must,” “Because I believe it serves me,” “Because I believe…” and then fill in whatever actually feels true in the moment. But remember whatever you fill in is your choice. It is still a decision that only you make. Consciously or not, it’s your power to wield. When you lose sight of that it’s because you’ve decided another’s reality is more preferable than your own.

The structure is simple: name what you’re experiencing/feeling, then own why you’ve chosen it. And ask yourself why you prefer this belief over anything/everything else. Why does this belief serve you better than any other belief you can have? Why THIS one, why not something else that you prefer?

What tends to happen when you do this is that the emotion loses some of its grip. It doesn’t disappear, but it becomes more identifiable. You’re closing the circuit.

Why does that matter?

A lot of emotional pain, doubt, cynicism, or anger doesn’t come from the feeling itself. It comes from the fact that we’ve never been taught how to close the circuit, so the emotion persists and turns into suffering.

Growing up, most people were taught to say “I feel afraid” or “I feel angry” and then just sit inside of it hoping for a wiser perspective to manifest. That truncated loop creates friction and a sense of incompleteness while you wait for reality to catch up.

When you add “because I choose to believe I must,” you bring YOUR specific awareness into the process – you’re not just parroting or echoing a response that you chose decades ago. That’s what lets the energy change instead of just pile up: clarity and ownership over your experience.

The trick is you can use it with any emotional state you choose. So why not choose a state that you prefer?

“I feel overwhelming joy because I choose to believe I must.”

“I feel deeply connected to this experience because I choose to believe I must.”

“I have compassion and love for this challenging situation because I prefer it.”

Seems kinda silly but it’s the exact thing we’ve been doing our whole lives in the opposite direction.

That allows us to take the automation out of the response and curate something specific: How do YOU want to experience things? Not what the past stories, experiences, or the world around us presumes, expects, or demands.

Reinforcing the positive stuff the same way you’ve automatically processed the negative stuff builds the same kind of closure.

Over time, moving through a difficult feeling and back to a preferred one gets easier. It may feel strange because we’re so used to valuing the emotional intensity as a type of action, and unsettling to just pick a preferred belief that is more consistently resonant with your core. But that’s the technology of how the experience of reality is created, and it’s where you’ve been living this whole time.