Do you know that excitement is not all positive?
Yes, excitement brings joy. But the kind of excitement I want to talk about in this letter is different.
Before we get into that, you need to first understand the difference between emotion as a fleeting feeling and emotion as a state of being.
Emotion as a fleeting feeling:
This is your everyday and surface-level emotion.
It can be a signal to trigger actions, or it can be something you use for a purpose. This is what we commonly refer to as emotional reactions.
For example, you feel sad for something that you see in front of you, such as a person falling down on a street. It triggers action: you run to them to help.
An example of how emotion as a feeling can be used for a purpose:
You feel extremely bored, so you use excitement to bring you joy; therefore, you grab your device and play a game.
Emotion as a state of being:
This is your dominant emotional state: the background, the default, or the base of your overall emotional state.
It is your default mode regardless of what is going on in your life, regardless of the fun or the tragedies happening around the world. Yes, you can have fleeting feelings too, but once it's over, you get back to this default mode.
This state, you don't feel it in your chest or body like fleeting feelings. This is your state of being, meaning the emotional energy is in your subconscious mind, not your body or emotional heart.
For example, your default, subconscious emotional state is grief. You don't cry every day because this is not a fleeting feeling or reaction. It is silent, but you know it's there once you see a pattern in your behaviour such as:
Always reaching out to people, socialising too much, talking too much, clinging to people, because if you don't, you will be alone, and when you are alone, your dominant state will be striking, which means you will start to notice the grief.
Another example of emotion as a state of being is joy. If joy is already your default mode, you don't need excitement. Of course, this is a very high state of being. That is why you almost can't find this kind of person. But it exists and probably only a minute percentage of human beings on planet Earth possess this as a state of being. The rest of us are on our journey finding the way there. Sounds sad, but it's not. It is literally what's happening to the majority of inhabitants on the planet. We think we are making things happen or changing the world, but actually, if you reflect deeply, every person is doing things in their life for just one purpose: to feel good or to feel better.
Now let’s look more closely at how this shows up.
Have you ever planned for an event in your life to bring joy and excitement, and then you achieve it, and then after some time the excitement fades, and then you have to plan again to feel excitement again only to wait until it is over, and then you have to do it all over again?
I'm not saying this is wrong. I'm sure most people are doing this because most of us are stuck in a system that distracts us from our own minds.
But this kind of excitement doesn't bring lasting joy or inner peace. They bring temporary excitement, and that is why you have to keep planning for the next hit.
Like when you finish one self-help book and straight away go and buy the next one. Not because the first one changed your life, but because the high is fading and your system needs another hit. Or when you suddenly sign up for some course you saw online, not because you need to learn something new, but because your body just wants movement and anything to avoid stillness.
Or those late-night Shopee refreshes. Add to cart, check out, track parcel. Not because you need any of it. But because maybe this one will make you feel better. Then the box comes, you get so excited, you open it, and five minutes later, your energy drops again.
Sometimes it shows up in gossip too. The kind where people keep calling just to talk about someone else’s life. It gives them a spike and thrill - something to react to so they don’t have to sit with their own story.
Applies to online haters as well. They pick fights because the silence inside is unbearable. That angry comment is their version of excitement. Because when it’s quiet, they have nothing to bounce off and that’s scarier than being disliked.
If your brain keeps running on dopamine (the chemical that spikes when you chase something) it eventually becomes desensitised. You will need more to feel less. That’s why the same excitement doesn’t land anymore. First it feels fun. Then necessary; then empty. But you keep doing it because you forgot how else to feel alive.
In contrast, when your system is in joy by default, you don't need to chase it. You don't need to buy something, plan something, start something just so that you can bring joy. It's already there. You find joy even in small things - making tea, wiping the table, or walking to the market.
Because joy is not in the activity; it's in the present moment itself, no matter what that moment is.
The present moment is the only real thing you ever have. Everything else is imagination. The future is just thoughts. The past is just memory. But now - this, what you are in now: this is the only place where joy can live.
Try to imagine and feel as if the present moment itself is your source of joy. Not what's in it, not who’s in it. Just being here, right now, is already joy.
You've seen this before: a happy baby. They don't need anything. They're just here, laughing, breathing; completely alive in the moment. That's what real joy looks like. Just being.
"What, I must become a baby again? Must start crawling again, is it?" No need. You don't need to become a baby. You just need to remove all the blocks between you and that joy.
These blocks are all the negative emotions you can think of that keeps you in a low dominant state of emotion, that causes you to need excitement to bring you joy.
What we really want is to be in a state of joy that naturally exudes excitement. But instead of “joy brings excitement,” most of us have been wired the other way round, to believe that “excitement brings joy” is the only way.
When joy is already your state, you don't need excitement. Can you imagine telling Buddha you're going to bring him on a cruise, and he responded with, "What! Omg, can't wait, can't wait"? If we think it's human to feel excited and jump, why do we feel it looks weird if, say, people like Thich Nhat Hanh or Eckhart Tolle or other luminaries dance and jump out of excitement? I mean, for sure they have it as fleeting emotions, but they definitely don't have the over-excitement kind, because they sure don't need it.
Why?
Because again, real excitement is a state of joy. You don’t need it to feel good; it comes because you already do. The excitement doesn’t spike your system or make you want to grab something. It doesn’t need an audience either. It just makes you want to show up, or to give, or to move.
If your system is blocked, you won’t be able to access that state. Not because something is wrong with you, but because your joy is trapped under layers of energetic noise. When excitement is something you chase, it’s a sign of underlying blockages. This is not new information. If you look into ancient philosophies, you will find them talking about the same thing.
In Taoism, when there is too much Yang energy - too much doing, chasing, striving - the system overheats. And unless it’s balanced with Yin energy which is stillness, clarity, and space, the whole system crashes.
In Buddhism, they talk about the realm of the hungry ghost. A state where no matter how much you eat, consume, possess, or feed yourself, you are never full. The craving here is not physical. It is spiritual. Because hunger is not for food. It is for peace.
In Hindu teachings, there are three states in the system: “Rajas” is all the movement, passion, stimulation. But if that fire runs for too long, it burns out and drops into “Tamas”, which is not calmness, but heaviness and even shutdown. The only way out is to rise into clarity, stillness, and balance (“Satva”). But most people get stuck looping between the high and the crash, without ever reaching that quiet middle.
This is why energy clearing is so important. I’m not saying jump straight into Deep Energy Clearing. That kind of work is deep and you need to be ready as it can shake super deep things up.
What you can do now, is just start noticing. That’s the first step to healing.
Next time you feel very excited (or looking for something to make you feel excited), ask yourself: am I really happy, or am I just trying not to feel quiet inside?
And when you feel bored, don’t be so fast to fix it. Just pause and ask: am I really bored, or is my body trying to tell me something is stuck and needs to come out?
Because real excitement is not something you find. It’s a product of joy that will come when you start clearing all the tangled energies and when you stop needing to chase excitement.
Till next week,
Shaya
