What do you do when you have a shitty day? When something happens that triggers an emotion inside you and you can’t get a handle on it; your whole body contracts and you feel it in your chest or your head or your core. It threatens to overtake you and suck you down with it. What do you do then? And what if that keeps going on all day and perhaps even spills into the next day? There are strategies you can use when this happens.  The other day something happened that totally dislodged me from my calm place and uncetered (decentered?) me. It had to do with my daughter and something that seemed really unfair to me when it happened. As the day went on and we solved it and everything turned out fine, the emotional turmoil I felt still lingered and spilled into the next day.  I did my meditation, which was amazing that day, but I still couldn’t shake this deep seated habit to feel sorry for myself. This is a habit I’ve been working on breaking and I know I’m not alone. It’s a lot easier to blame, feel sorry for yourself, and to feel like a victim but that’s the most disempowering  place we can be. Then this disempowerment can continue not just for a day, not just for a week but sometimes for months or years.  How do we stop that? The biggest technique – and it’s not rocket science – is simply choosing. Choosing something different. Choosing to not identify with that emotion and by this I don’t mean ignoring it. Choosing to acknowledge the emotion by saying something like this to yourself: “This unsettled me, maybe it wasn’t fair, maybe I disagree with how it was handled, maybe the other person was even wrong or didn’t handle the situation in the best way possible. And this emotion that I’m feeling…perhaps I even feel justified in feeling it. And perhaps I even want to dwell on it. But the fact is, it’s not making me feel very good and I would rather not feel this way, so I’m going to choose to acknowledge that this is how I’m feeling. I’m going to choose to acknowledge that yes, I would rather feel sorry for myself, I would rather blame the other person and I would rather blame the world and sit here as a victim, hoping someone would solve this for me and make it go away.” It’s totally ok to acknowledge what feels true for you in this moment. And then choose to empower yourself and decide if you want to stay here in this emotion or do you want to choose to feel differently.  This was the choice that I was faced with that day. Despite meditating and connecting with that Source energy that feels so delicious and then coming back out of it and still feeling shitty – realizing that it’s my choice. This is where we can tap into the magnetic properties of emotion. If you choose to dwell on the unfairness or the anger or whatever, you will magnetize more of those emotions to you. You’re going to attract more of that throughout your day. Or you can choose to focus on feeling something else.  And this isn’t always easy. It’s not easy to just flip. And it’s not about going from angry to blissful. It’s about choosing to take the journey and focusing on whatever it is that makes you feel just a little bit better so that you can end your day or end your morning on a higher note and a more happy feeling.  But it is absolutely a choice that you make.  We all have a past. We all have stuff that happened to us that often isn’t fair and it often doesn’t feel good. But it’s our responsibility – not our fault  that this shit happened – big difference – it’s our responsibility to empower ourselves to do what we can to get ourselves through it, resolve it, and live the best life we can.  If you have to ask for help then you ask for help. If you think you can do it yourself, then go for it. But the fact is, the way you get through a shitty day is you choose to.  It’s easier to feel like a victim and feel sorry for yourself – but that also is a choice.  Everything is possible if we believe it is and sometimes we might not know how to get there but it happens one choice at a time.  I still don’t know why this emotional upheaval happened in the grand scheme of things. But it reminded me of this fact that I have a choice and that’s enough. It got me to choose to feel differently. It got me to reach out and ask for help, go for a coffee with a friend and have a conscious conversation around things that inspire me so that I could feel better and empowered. This allowed me to deal with that situation from a more level headed place so that I could express my needs more eloquently instead of from a reactive place.  Test it out for yourself. When something causes you to have a shitty day you get to decide how you react to it. Just because you’ve reacted one way for the last 20 years doesn’t mean that you have to keep reacting that way. You can choose differently. It takes energy and conscious effort sometimes, but the more you choose that the easier it gets.  There are people in the world who have had really shitty stuff happen to them who chose to feel differently. Look at Nelson Mandela – stuck in jail for 27 years! If he could choose not to be angry then you and I can choose to feel differently over stuff that’s (typically) a lot less shitty.  Share the love! Know someone who needs these tips? Share this article.