You Don't Know What You Feel
A lot of suffering stems from not knowing what we want. The only way to know what we want is to enquire. All enquiry requires awareness. Of your thoughts. Your feelings. Your urges. Your instincts. That feeling in your stomach when you see something or someone is important data. Pay attention to it.
That data reveals what you secretly crave. If you ask someone what emotions they went through today, they will have no idea. They have never bothered to sit still and reflect on their thoughts. They have no record of the emotions they experienced. Yet in the back of their mind, thoughts are constantly racing. They experience similar emotions every day, and yet they remain clueless by the end of it.
That's why journaling every day works. It forces you to enquire into what you were feeling. As you write down the dominant feeling in your diary, you revisit all the emotions you felt throughout the day. This makes you think from a third person's perspective. It also makes you aware of the thoughts that constantly race through your mind.
This is the most important exercise you can do. At the end of every day, sit down, open the notes app, and list every thought and emotion you experienced. Describe each in one word. Write everything down as bullet points. You only need to label them to the best of your knowledge.
The next step is identifying which thought dominated the most. Which thought disturbed you the most. Which thought provoked the strongest reaction in you. Sit with that feeling for a while. Go deeper into it. How did you feel in that moment. Where in your body did you feel that emotion. What was it that you felt. Why do you think you felt it so intensely.
The objective is to assess your emotions. Do that every day and you will begin to see a pattern. Categorise the emotions that dominate your days. There could be a deeper pattern waiting to be discovered. That is the whole point of this exercise. In my experience, this works better than journaling.
Don't let your emotions dictate your mindset. Investigate every emotion and, if possible, resolve it. Be aware of what you crave, what you can satisfy, and which emotions are relevant to what you want to become.