Editor’s Note (2025):
This post was first written in 2020, during a season when my writing carried a more poetic, expansive tone. I’ve kept it here in the archives because the essence of its message still rings true: joy is our inheritance, and the practice of tending to our inner world is how we experience it more fully.
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Why We Struggle to Follow Through on Our Intentions
Why is it that we so often don’t follow through with our deepest intentions for ourselves? How often have we found ourselves making grand plans, and yet when the moment to move forward arrives, we fail to act? It’s like this with feelings as well. We claim to know what to do when hurt arises or how to create greater abundance, yet what we know flies out the window in place of egoic reactions that don’t serve.
We can do better — and we will. Joy is our natural inheritance, our birthright. It’s time to come home to the truth of our power: the ability to shape, guide, and tend our inner world in ways that serve us. You are not a pawn or a victim of life. You are royalty — radiant, worthy, and powerful — and it’s more than appropriate that we learn how to master our emotional world with greater skill and care.
For how can we truly ascend and graduate to an experience of greater inner and outer freedom, joy, expansion and peace without the clarity of being available to navigate and regulate our feelings with ease and grace? Yes, being in a powerful relationship with one’s emotions is entirely possible, and the next quantum leap for humanity. For at the moment, many on the planet don’t possess this dynamic with their feelings, therefore resulting in much inner chaos, which further creates outer chaos. Hence, the disorder we see in the world. There is not an individual who doesn’t, can’t, and will not impact the greater whole. Surely, after the recent health crisis you see this?
Coming Home to Yourself Through Emotional Mastery
There is nowhere the individual can go where they are not affected by another. The reality of our interconnectedness has never been so clear. An event in China quickly arrived at the world’s front door. An evident example of how not separate we are. Yet, let’s go back to you, for there is no expectation that you now go “out there” to save the world. Rather, know that the most significant gift we can provide the health and well being of humanity is to pay attention to and focus on developing one’s sense of freedom.
Begin there. Begin at home and trust that self-love will stretch to every nook and corner of the planet. It could not not do so. Isn’t this just a glorious gift of inner knowing? As love, emotional relief and understanding is provided by you and for you one is saving the world! How’s that for a win/win resolution?
Joy and abundance is our inheritance. Yet, we have not been properly taught how to best access that feeling state. For without practice and habituation, we return to old, egoic ways.
A Simple Practice to Close With
The next time you feel yourself drifting into old patterns or egoic reactions, pause and take one slow, conscious breath. Place your attention on a single good-feeling thought — it might be gratitude for a warm cup of tea, a kind text from a friend, or simply the relief of the pause itself. Let that small moment of alignment remind you that joy and abundance are always available, right here, right now.
Dr. Dowling has spent years helping people live richer, more joyful lives. She has seen firsthand the magical pairing of psychology and life coaching, which allows people to access their happiest selves.
View Dr. Dowling's articles on Mindbodygreen
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