Are You Polluting Your Emotional Space?: How to take back control of how you feel in your environment.

Sometimes its difficult to take a step back and look at how our actions and attitude are affecting our environment.  It’s easy to see how someone else could change their behavior and make everything else better.

My teacher once told me that we create the atmosphere around us. This advice came to me during a time when I was living with a roommate who was driving me crazy. This roommate was going through a very difficult time, was very depressed and was affecting the whole house, or so I thought.

 

At the time I was given this advice, “You create your own atmosphere”, I wanted so desperately to ignore it and tell this brilliant man whom I loved and respected that he must be mistaken. If he only saw what I was going through he would surely change his tune and see that I couldn’t possibly be responsible for the atmosphere in my home.

 

It hit a nerve with me and like most things that hit a nerve with me I had to let it sink in at my own pace. I ended up leaving the house not too long after I was given this advice. At the time I left it had not quite developed into a useful tool.

 

Looking back I am beginning to understand what he meant. People around me are always going to act how they will act. Sometimes I’ll deem their behavior as alright and other times it will be deemed boorish. What they do I can’t control but I can control how I interpret it.

 

Taking a closer look at the atmosphere I am responsible for….

 

Imagine (or pretend) that there is a giant bubble around you at all times.  You can’t get out of this bubble and no one can come into the bubble. It’s kind of like rolling around in a giant hamster ball.  This hamster ball is your atmosphere.

 

Everything that is in your hamster ball is coming from you. If you pass gas in your hamster ball this stink is from you. If you have mud on your shoes and it gets on the sides of the hamster ball it is your mud from your feet. This hamster ball is a lot like your atmosphere that you create, but instead of gas and mud in the ball what affects our atmosphere is more emotional and behavioral.

 

Consider now that you have this imaginary hamster ball around you and what you put into it you end up experiencing.

 

Let’s say something happens and you react in a disrespectful manner.  Disrespect is now in your hamster ball.

 

If you are unloving, that is now also in your hamster ball.

 

If you judge another for what you thinking they are doing, that is now in your hamster ball.

 

If you are angry and attack another, that is now in your hamster ball.

 

 

In this way we create the atmosphere around us. If you are walking around in this hamster ball that is filled with disrespect, judgments, unloving actions and anger how do you think you will interpret others around you?  We oftentimes mistake others around us for the junk we put into our hamster balls (or atmosphere).

 

 

What if instead of polluting our hamster ball or atmosphere with junk we don’t want in our life, we started to put in what we wanted?

 

If you want to experience respect, give it.  It will be something you add to your atmosphere.

 

If you want others to stop judging you, notice when you judge another and see their innocence. There is a correlation between the judgment we feel and the judgment we offer.  When you’re gentle with others you experience this gentleness.

 

If you want others to see that you are doing the best you can, start seeing it in others. Kindness will enter your atmosphere and begin to fill it.

 

If you want to experience forgiveness, offer it. The freedom forgiveness offers will be added to your hamster ball.

 

 

In all these ways and many more we affect our atmosphere or emotional well-being. What does your atmosphere (or hamster ball look like)?

 

I am beginning to understand the advice that was given to me years ago, “You create your own environment”.  Looking back at my living situation with my depressed roommate I can see how my judgments and criticism were effecting how I felt. I can see how I was polluting my own atmosphere.

 

This doesn’t mean that we have to stay in unhealthy environments.  Your motivation to leave a relationship can come from love or fear.  The manner in which we choose to exit has the biggest effect on what we are putting into our atmosphere.