In my experience, God’s guidance is marked by a kind of peace coupled with knowing. There is peace, even if you have to act quickly. Kind of like God’s Spirit holds you steady when normally you would feel extremely afraid or frozen by that fear.
Anxiety may be rooted in the stress of your life or born from some trauma that when touched or triggered dominoes into a series of anxious thoughts which chill when you release the stress.
Also, God usually gives you a lead up to the information. You will experience a series of signs visions or dreams that point you to action or at least awareness…
God will speak into your heart and whisper inaudiable words, sentences, questions . It is very subtle how God engages us. God doesn’t always go for flashy. You almost can’t tell it apart from your own inner dialogue except you might begin to wonder, why am I thinking about this?
Of course you have to test the spirit. You will know the Holy Spirit from a spirit of fear because of what the message is trying to do. If it is making you feel afraid, powerless, helpless, driving you crazy… Why tell you at all? A spirit of fear feeds on your fear. So it wants you to feel those things.
The Holy Spirit does not feed on you. It empowers and emboldens you to do good, be kind, to love, heal, protect. Through God’s power, not our own.
A spirit of rage stirs us toward violence. Hate begats hate, and violence begats violence, thus it feeds and grows. But the Holy Spirit brings peace and rest, forgiveness and release. The Holy Spirit does not destroy life.
The Holy Spirit does not shame or guilt you. But a religious spirit will. The kind of spirit that heaps rule after rule uoon you, no matter how pointless and mundane. It demands obedience but can never be satisfied. It preaches hellfire and brimstone nonstop and relishes in the tears of Christ, the suffering of the flesh, the subjugation of the human spirit. It is a spirit of control, the cult hive. It feeds on the control and power over you. And usually a very human person weilds the power.
The Holy Spirit sets you free. Teaches you the difference between being a slave and being a child of God. Living in love is enough. Forgiving others, being merciful. Live in that Spirit, and you will be free. God will guide you through maturity when it comes to the rest…
With that said, human emotions are not demons. We experience a wide spectrum of feelings in our own right. These are normal. And they serve as guide posts. When we experience emotions, they can point to something that is going on in our lives The stronger they are, the more there is to unpack and examine. They reveal a deeper need, issue, hurt, trauma that must be addressed.
There is a sayiing, make peace with your demons. This of course refers to our inner psychology. In Eastern faiths, emotions are sometimes referred to as demons- fear, shame, guilt, dissapoontment, frustration, grief, unforgiveness etc, and result from happenings and thought patterns that begin in our youth at various stages.
Many things begin as childhood adaption strategies to cope with overwhelming events and or to help us not to focus on or deal with something much bigger than our younger selves at that time.
Many addictive behaviors- for instance- to sex, drugs and so on stem from this need to turn away and forget an overwhelming experience or threat. Or to ignor stress after being inundated with stress during our youth.
Until the pain is focussed on, the negative thought pattern addressed, the wound healed, the behavior will remain strong and active. Whether it is sin or not is irrelevant- it will have power over you until you address exactly what it helps you to cope with or avoid.
That saying of making friends means to not repress your feelings or be in denial of them but instead to accept their existence, to admit something is going on and to spend time understanding what exactly it is trying to tell you.
Then of course when you have religious institutions and authorities who demonize normal human behavior, like the human drive for sex or telling men not to have feelings, and so on, we learn to repress and push away what cannot be turned off. This creates a dam effect where those feelings grow and grow until the dam can no longer hold it.
You know what happens when mankind tells a wind not to blow? It blows. You know what happens when man tells a river not to flow? It blows too, unless the pressure is relieved.
This is why sexual behavior is so out of control in our country. The dam didn’t hold. If we taught responsible behavior, and taught our youth to be more considerate of others, we would have less stds, unwed mothers, children having children, selfish behavior.
But we stay the course- deny deny deny.
One last thing to keep in mind are physical health issues that affect our brains and by extension our minds. Malnutrition- not getting enough vitamins and minerals, can cause a lot of feelings. Nervousness, depression etc.
