Our lives may be colored by a particular feeling or mood, accompanied by certain thoughts or beliefs that seem to recur. In my own life I have noticed an automatic emotional reaction to the unexpected: this moment of fear, a sense of “Uh oh, what’s about to happen?” Some part of me seems primed to expect the worst. When someone important to me says, “Oh, I want to talk to you,” then I feel myself preparing for something awful. With time I have been  able to notice this, take in a breath, and choose to be open to whatever is about to happen. Often these conversations end up interesting, helpful, beneficial, or transformative, but still this part of me prepares for a catastrophe that may never happen.

Analytical psychology may call this a complex; Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) calls it a negative cognitive schema. Strict CBT theorists say that the thought causes the feeling, the thought that “something bad is always around the corner,” for example. I have a minor quibble in that I think sometimes those feelings are activated by certain conditions and then justify themselves with relevant thoughts. Either way, these thoughts and feelings happen together. We can allow them to continue making each other bigger and bigger. We can notice the automatic responses, take a deep breath, and look at what is happening with curiosity.

Thoughts and feelings are like the two wings of a bird or plane. We may want to elevate one and diminish the other, but both can help or harm us. If one is not working properly, the other suffers. If both are faulty, good luck getting off the ground. I encourage a willingness to listen and hold both with interest.

I cannot get rid of that moment of fear, and I’ve tried! What I can do is notice what the fear wants and does: my muscles start to constrict, heart rate accelerates, I start preparing for defense or flight. The fear is saying: something unexpected is happening, and I do not know what’s coming. The fear is bringing me to attention and presence in the moment, but it wants to go further into a narrower room. Fear wants to be ready for something bad, and intellectually I understand from experience and insight that what’s coming could be something wonderful, something neutral, or something that I know I can handle because I have survived so much already. If the thoughts start saying, “Don’t be stupid, you always act like this, nothing bad’s going to happen,” then I’ve become locked in an inner debate that will only escalate the inner tension.

Fear is not trying to hear any of that. Fear knows something bad could always happen. Fear is not wrong. Reason is not wrong either. This is an unwinnable inner argument. My best option is not to take sides, but to make room for every part of me. Time to breathe, slowly and consciously, letting my muscles relax. Breathe, and bring my attention to what’s happening, to the conversation at hand. If I can continue breathing, I know that I am alive, I know that I can get through what’s happening.

I speak of fear but that is only one example. You may respond to everything with irritation or anger: hurt, inconvenience, impatience, the unexpected. You may respond by becoming numb or disconnected to your experience, feeling lost in a fog or like you’re floating somewhere away from your body. You may respond by focusing only on whatever feels good in the moment, tuning out everything else.

(Have you ever felt intense desire or affection for someone or something who ended up being bad for you? Did you ever, while feeling those feelings, have moments of doubting thoughts that you ignored by focusing on what you thought was good and happy about the relationship? After the relationship was over, did you ever kick yourself or ask your friends “Why didn’t you warn me?” when you were warned, in so many ways?)

What I advocate is effort to work with both as each bringing something important to the table, but each potentially being misleading in some way. This can feel difficult to work with, takes time and practice, and there is always an opportunity to practice. This way of being does not offer a sense of security by stating rules that are always true, though you may come to discover your own inner set of rules that makes sense for you. Enter into a conversation with yourself, constantly unfolding, in which many voices have a chance to speak, and each has value. The voice that says “This is wonderful!” and the voice that says “I have doubts” are both welcome and heard, though neither gets to steer the plane alone.

Vulnerability can be a terrifying feeling to have. We spend much of our lives developing strategies to mitigate this, this underlying awareness of our own vulnerability, our mortality, our living in an unpredictable world. Perhaps we stay on the surface and only focus on what feels good, uplifting, or orderly. Perhaps we fixate on the vulnerability and spend hours of life worrying about what might happen. Perhaps we get stuck in grief, or stuck chasing the substances and relationships that keep us from feeling the anxiety and vulnerability below.

When giant catastrophes happen, such as the many that have occurred this week around the world, the anxiety and pain can feel palpable and hard to deny. Everything we try to do to contain or ignore it doesn’t seem to work. I noticed myself, as I watched footage of explosions in Boston more than was healthy, feeling a sense of urgency around their resolution. I wanted to know why it happened, who caused it, and I wanted the perpetrators to be found and contained as quickly as possible. This swiftness of reaction is one that I find completely understandable, and inherently more problematic. I reminded myself often, as I jumped to conclusions, of how little I knew about the circumstances. I remembered that such swift conclusiveness in the face of little evidence almost inevitably leads to the kind of confusion we’ve seen in the 24-hour news cycle this week.

What I suspect is that this wish for closure, containment, and wish for a strong protective authority to enclose me comes out of my discomfort with my own vulnerability. So many painful things we do in life, I think, share this root. Becoming addicted to some drug, behavior, or relationship that causes us suffering. Rejecting someone before he rejects me. Insisting I cannot do a task when I’ve never tried. These feel like a child’s early attempts to bring solidity and structure to a world that feels unsafe. When we do this as a society, we make collective mistakes whose impacts far exceed our capacity to manage. We get into wars that drain our resources, injure our people, and contribute immeasurable suffering to communities. We empower the police to erode our own rights and protections, break up families, and imprison or kill people who may only be guilty of having a particular skin color. We do not use our resources and power with skill and effectiveness, addressing the core problems.

What I am trying to invite in myself is compassion for the fear and vulnerability that’s arising, a willingness to contribute to those who were directly impacted and suffering the most, and an openness of mind to what evidence is present. To slow down a bit. To feel vulnerable and angry and continue to listen to what is unfolding. To recognize even now the urge to have some answer that will wrap up the problem, and to try to open my ears a little more and realize that I am one person among billions attempting to understand and create a meaningful life in the world. I share my humanity with those who are perpetrators and victims, and I contribute what I can to ease our collective suffering.

Mood is like weather. Moods change and shift without warning, their causes are subtle and at times difficult to predict. With self-observation one may come to notice certain patterns, like feeling particularly irritable during the early spring, or prone to melancholy in the late fall. We may learn certain tricks or develop strategies to shift these moods, but often it feels out of our hands.

We get tripped up in the relationship between mood and action. I have had the experience, and I suspect others have as well, in which I’ve looked forward to some particular event or eagerly awaited the time when I could be available to write or engage in some hobby, only to find when the time arrives that my mood has suddenly shifted and gone sour and now, “I don’t feel like doing it.”

Sometimes this inhibition overcomes the plan and instead of doing the thing we looked forward to doing we do nothing, or engage in usual numbing habits, and the opportunity passes by. Healthy habits we long to integrate go by the wayside. Assignments stay unfinished, paperwork sits in a pile, the novel sits unwritten. This problem is exacerbated by problematic mood states like depression or mania, in which we need that much more energy and focus to do the work that would ground and nourish us. Sometimes our moods are like torrential rain or a tornado; the best we can do is buckle down and wait for it to pass.

I think there are times when our intuition speaks to us and advises us against a course of action, sometimes at a time that feels inconvenient. I am not convinced that this is usually what’s happening when these shifts of mood occur. There is something in us that longs to be actualized in the world, core values that can anchor and inform our lives. There are also parts of us that, for whatever reason, resist these values and resist acting upon our desires for connection, for health, for creative expression, and so forth. Even with this resistance, we can move toward these values and desires. I think we can become more creative and flexible with our responses to mood. We can notice what we always do when a particular mood strikes, and try doing something different. See what happens.

When I decided to commit to exercising, I learned that I rarely if ever am “in the mood” to work out. If I let that mood make my choices, I may sit around the house becoming increasingly mopey and lethargic, not feeling like doing much of anything at all. My mood has not gotten better, it’s worse. If, instead, I decide to go ahead and start exercising, letting myself start slowly and do as much as my body seems inclined to do, I often discover that I walk away from exercising feeling energized, refreshed, and engaged. My mood has vastly improved, and it is not running my life.

I think, like many feelings, mood is telling us something about our experience, but again I see this less as a call to action and more as a weather report. If I’m feeling irritable, then I can proceed through my day with the awareness that I might be irritated and distressed by incidents that would feel negligible on other days. When something like that happens, I can remember to take a breath and temper my response before proceeding. I can admit to my loved ones, “I’m feeling irritable today,” as a good-faith warning to take into consideration. (Not a threat — “Steer clear of me or I’ll bite your head off.”) Sometimes this admission feels uncomfortable because it exposes some of our vulnerability to others, that awareness that we don’t always have it all together and sometimes our thoughts and moods seem to be miscued with the environment.

I don’t advocate wholly ignoring mood.  I seek integrity between “what I feel like doing” and “what I want and need to do.” I often think of an integrated life as a sailing ship. I have this vision of my destination and the path I need to take to arrive. Without that goal, I am simply listing about in the ocean. Yet I need to account for how the wind and tides move so I can harness those energies toward my goal. Some days I may only go forward a little bit, other days I may go forward a lot.

Recently I noticed I was becoming more irritable and feeling overwhelmed, and I decided to create a vacation for myself in which I didn’t go anywhere but took a break from some of my responsibilities. I still engaged in some of the core practices that help me to feel healthy and satisfied with my life, like exercise, writing, and spiritual practice. Part of me longed to withdraw completely but I chose to spend time with friends. I decided to approach this slowly, as I would with exercise: I will just show up and offer as much as I am willing to do. I will slow down. I will breathe through the impulse to rush and add tasks to my to-do list. I will listen for what I want in the moment.