feelings and thoughts and truth... what a mix!

I was told last week, or reminded actually, that my feelings are just mere feelings. One does not necessarily need to follow them by actions, to obey what the feelings suggest one should do. Also, my emotions/feelings are not the truth about any given thing/situation/person laden as they are with all sorts of stuff (both inner and outer, past experiences, states of body and soul and spirit etc). I can't determine their accuracy by the intensity of the feeling.... ! An emotion cannot actually drown me, change reality, force me to do anything... It is merely an emotion!!

As a side remark, though, this was so refreshingly counter women's-magazine & Hollywood movies' type of advice, which tells you to go where your heart leads you.

And we all know where that is: usually down- a "I-have-to-do-what-feels-good-for-me-right-now-while-ignoring-everybody-else", but what this advice fails to tell you is where all of this will lead you and it never tells you what really happens after you do. Sometimes, of course, we need to put ourselves first, but I suspect it is not necessary nearly as often as these magazines would have us believe, or as our amazingly selfish hearts tell us.

The same person then proceeded to remind me that also my thoughts are merely thoughts, and as such are not the truth. They may or may not be, but a lot of the stuff I hold as self-evident might not be true at all, especially the kind of beliefs that result in thoughts like "what's the use?" "I'll never succeed" "everybody else has got it so together" .

I need more objective parameters to determine the truthfulness of what goes on in my mind or soul .

So far so good, and all of this may even sound very trivial indeed, and even self-evident ;) but for a person who earns her living by thinking, this actually is a big deal. This realization hit home even more strongly after I've just discovered that my carefully analyzed research data might need to be looked at again and might not even be so clear as I thought (sic!) it was!!!

Add to this then the fact that I tend to trust my intuition and hence feelings about things/events/people, the meaning of undergoing a sea-change takes on a new dimension!

Not only do I need to re-examine my research data, but I need to re-examine the things I think/feel in even greater detail: do they actually reflect the true state of things or not?

Now that is the question!