Experience Peace by Embracing Life
Most of us consistently engage in a behavior that dooms us to feeling disappointed, angry and resentful: we expect people or situations to be a certain way and resist the way that they actually are. Worse yet, many of us have no idea that we even operate like this! We may even bend over backward trying to please somebody else and overstep our own boundaries and integrity in the process. Then, when the person we were trying to please still isn’t happy, we’re left wondering why we even bothered. The truth is, why bother? Each of us can only please ourselves. Nobody else can do it for us.
As long as I expect people or situations to be a certain way, I’m locked into things looking or being just one way. If my friend, business associate or family member respects me, then they’ll return my calls. If my spouse or partner loves me then they’ll do what I want them to do. Well, what happens when my calls aren’t returned and my spouse or partner does what they want instead of what I want them to do? If I’m unwilling to accept things the way that they actually are, I may very well end up spending most of my time feeling miserable. Actually, expecting usually sets me up for unhappiness since I don’t get to control the people and circumstances of my life, and rarely if ever is reality an exact match to my expectations.
Expecting sounds like, “Things have to go THIS way. Everything is all wrong.” It feels like disappointment, anger or resentment. It looks rigid, righteous and unyielding. Having expectations makes us dependent on other people and the circumstances of our lives in order to be happy.
Accepting sounds like, “Things went differently than I thought they should or might go, but it turns out that’s great because ________. Everything is all right.” It feels like peace and joy. It looks soft, opening and giving. Being accepting of whatever presents itself in our lives allows us to experience peace and joy regardless of our circumstances. (This does not mean to stay in an abusive or unhealthy situation. This means that you can see the benefits of your current situation even as you take actions to change things for the better. Maybe you have a strong support system on which you can rely, or perhaps you have a plan that you’ve begun to put into action to remove yourself from the situation.)
Changing the way that we think and behave from expecting to accepting can feel uncomfortable because we’ve formed opinions since a young age about the way things should be and how people should act. But, when you accept the way things actually are, you begin to experience peace on a more regular basis. Things flow instead of feeling like a struggle. You’re not only opening to the situations and circumstances of your life, but also embracing the people in it, including yourself.
Call to Action: Where in your life do your expectations have you locked in and resisting the current reality? What do you gain by thinking and behaving this way? What might be possible for you or available to you if you chose to consciously recognize the gifts in the way things actually are? What action can you take this week to shift around this person or situation?
Remember: Nobody else can make you happy via their words or actions. It’s only your thoughts about yourself and the world that determine whether you live in peace and the flow of life, or in discontent and resisting life. Which do you choose, to expect or to accept?
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
What's Your Truth?
Based on our life experiences, values and beliefs, each of us has our own truth. What is true for you is not necessarily true for me and vice versa. There is space for all of our truths to coexist simultaneously. No one has to be right and no one has to be wrong. What’s true for us is simply true for us. And it is okay for our truths to change in any given moment or on any given day. Actually, it’s natural for a person who is growing and changing to have what is true for them grow and change with them.
Don Miguel Ruiz says in his book, The Mastery of Love, that we should not believe him. Similarly, he advocates that we don’t believe anyone else, or even ourselves. I think that this is really sound advice. What it means to me is to recognize that what is true for anybody else is not necessarily true for me and that what I accept as true for me may not actually be my only truth. Basically then, acting on Ruiz’s advice has me continuously questioning what I believe to be true. This is a very useful tool for personal growth.
When I’m not questioning my thoughts and what I believe to be true, I become entrenched in my thinking, stagnant and locked into just one way of viewing myself and the world. Clearly, this is hardly conducive to growth. Questioning, on the other hand, brings me present to this moment and what is true for me within it. With these realizations, comes greater self-knowledge.
It’s also important for me to point out that I only know my own truth and you only know yours. Consequently, I don’t have your answers. What a relief! I don’t know what’s right for you and you don’t know what’s right for me. It’s a beautiful and liberating thing because it means that ultimately, as adults, we are each responsible only for ourselves.
Don Miguel Ruiz says in his book, The Mastery of Love, that we should not believe him. Similarly, he advocates that we don’t believe anyone else, or even ourselves. I think that this is really sound advice. What it means to me is to recognize that what is true for anybody else is not necessarily true for me and that what I accept as true for me may not actually be my only truth. Basically then, acting on Ruiz’s advice has me continuously questioning what I believe to be true. This is a very useful tool for personal growth.
When I’m not questioning my thoughts and what I believe to be true, I become entrenched in my thinking, stagnant and locked into just one way of viewing myself and the world. Clearly, this is hardly conducive to growth. Questioning, on the other hand, brings me present to this moment and what is true for me within it. With these realizations, comes greater self-knowledge.
It’s also important for me to point out that I only know my own truth and you only know yours. Consequently, I don’t have your answers. What a relief! I don’t know what’s right for you and you don’t know what’s right for me. It’s a beautiful and liberating thing because it means that ultimately, as adults, we are each responsible only for ourselves.
Monday, November 17, 2008
What Are You Waiting For?
Richard Bach says in his book, Illusions, that it’s not faith that we need or lack in our lives, it’s imagination. We create and draw into our lives all that we experience. So, to change what we have, we need to imagine what we’d like to have. This got me thinking about peace. Really all I want more of in my life is peace. This is great because it happens to be one thing that I control. Woo hoo!
In the past, when I thought about peace, I thought about it in more global terms. It was always ‘out there’ somewhere. It didn’t have much to do with me, because I wasn’t going around waging war. Or so I thought. The truth is that I’m not peaceful anytime that I’m judging. As soon as I think someone or something is right or wrong, I’m no longer present with myself. I’ve entered into my story and I’m running with it. Usually this looks like me trying to build a case to persuade myself or someone else that I’m right. The point I’m trying to make here is that peace doesn’t happen first in the world around us and then we can feel peaceful within ourselves. Peace starts inside us and then it naturally shows up in the world around us, not the other way around.
This has been really obvious to me when I think about the recent presidential election. You know, I’ve got my life experiences and the things that I value dictating what I choose to believe. From this, I align with whichever candidate or party seems the most similar to my beliefs. The easy thing to do is to then believe that anyone who doesn’t believe the same things I do is wrong, uninformed or just plain stupid ~ to judge them for being different than I am, in other words. Repeatedly, I’ve found myself wondering how anybody could possibly align with the ‘other’ party.
My tendency is to believe that if they’d simply ‘get it’ and change their beliefs, we’d have peace. Obviously, that isn’t true though. The issue isn’t whether or not we all think alike. (I’m actually quite glad that we don’t or the world would be a truly boring place.) The issue is whether or not I can own that I’m waging war within myself when I think that somebody else is wrong, or even when I think that I’m wrong. I’m anything but calm and peaceful when I believe that somebody else is wrong. In fact, I’m usually loud and quite agitated.
The truth is that the ‘other guy’ isn’t wrong and I’m right, or vice versa. We’re both right. When we take into consideration what our life experiences have been and what we each value, it becomes very clear that our beliefs are right for us. My beliefs are right for me, and yours are right for you. One of us doesn’t have to be right and one of us wrong. In fact, that kind of thinking creates war within us. I believe that our outer world is a reflection of our inner world. So, if there’s war surrounding us, as there is in our world, then it’s there to mirror the war within us. Clean up the war within us and the war without us can’t continue. How can it possibly continue without us?
Well, like I said earlier though, the good news is that this is within my control. I get to choose to be right, which may be what I’m most used to doing, or to be at peace. I choose peace. This requires that I imagine what peace might look and feel like inside of me concerning this situation. Peace is warmth, beauty, joy and acceptance coursing through my body. Peace is physical relaxation and perhaps a smile on my face. Peace is observing my thoughts instead of wholeheartedly believing them and then making ‘the other guy’ wrong for believing differently.
How fun to then imagine in what ways my life might be different if I just consistently engaged in this behavior of observing myself instead of judging others! What might be possible for me? How might my family life change, my business alter, the city in which I live be affected by this one simple act of me becoming more peaceful?
That’s where my thoughts can dwell when I have a moment to myself to think and be quiet ~ to imagining all the beauty that could be possible in my life and surroundings just by my shifting out of judgment and into observation, into peace.
Call to Action: Where are you giving away your chance for peace and blaming somebody else for it? “It’s their fault! If they’d just think like me, everything would be grand!” Notice how you feel when you do this. What happens to you physically? Where do your thoughts go? Is this something you want more of in your life? If not, ask yourself what you can do to shift this pattern in your way of being, then commit to doing so, and do so. Start today.
Remember: The difficult but responsible thing to do is to own and accept that you are the only one that controls what’s going on inside of you and in your life. If it’s less than ideal, only you can change it. As long as you wait for everybody else to change and get their thinking and their act together, you get to be right but miserable. What are you waiting for?
In the past, when I thought about peace, I thought about it in more global terms. It was always ‘out there’ somewhere. It didn’t have much to do with me, because I wasn’t going around waging war. Or so I thought. The truth is that I’m not peaceful anytime that I’m judging. As soon as I think someone or something is right or wrong, I’m no longer present with myself. I’ve entered into my story and I’m running with it. Usually this looks like me trying to build a case to persuade myself or someone else that I’m right. The point I’m trying to make here is that peace doesn’t happen first in the world around us and then we can feel peaceful within ourselves. Peace starts inside us and then it naturally shows up in the world around us, not the other way around.
This has been really obvious to me when I think about the recent presidential election. You know, I’ve got my life experiences and the things that I value dictating what I choose to believe. From this, I align with whichever candidate or party seems the most similar to my beliefs. The easy thing to do is to then believe that anyone who doesn’t believe the same things I do is wrong, uninformed or just plain stupid ~ to judge them for being different than I am, in other words. Repeatedly, I’ve found myself wondering how anybody could possibly align with the ‘other’ party.
My tendency is to believe that if they’d simply ‘get it’ and change their beliefs, we’d have peace. Obviously, that isn’t true though. The issue isn’t whether or not we all think alike. (I’m actually quite glad that we don’t or the world would be a truly boring place.) The issue is whether or not I can own that I’m waging war within myself when I think that somebody else is wrong, or even when I think that I’m wrong. I’m anything but calm and peaceful when I believe that somebody else is wrong. In fact, I’m usually loud and quite agitated.
The truth is that the ‘other guy’ isn’t wrong and I’m right, or vice versa. We’re both right. When we take into consideration what our life experiences have been and what we each value, it becomes very clear that our beliefs are right for us. My beliefs are right for me, and yours are right for you. One of us doesn’t have to be right and one of us wrong. In fact, that kind of thinking creates war within us. I believe that our outer world is a reflection of our inner world. So, if there’s war surrounding us, as there is in our world, then it’s there to mirror the war within us. Clean up the war within us and the war without us can’t continue. How can it possibly continue without us?
Well, like I said earlier though, the good news is that this is within my control. I get to choose to be right, which may be what I’m most used to doing, or to be at peace. I choose peace. This requires that I imagine what peace might look and feel like inside of me concerning this situation. Peace is warmth, beauty, joy and acceptance coursing through my body. Peace is physical relaxation and perhaps a smile on my face. Peace is observing my thoughts instead of wholeheartedly believing them and then making ‘the other guy’ wrong for believing differently.
How fun to then imagine in what ways my life might be different if I just consistently engaged in this behavior of observing myself instead of judging others! What might be possible for me? How might my family life change, my business alter, the city in which I live be affected by this one simple act of me becoming more peaceful?
That’s where my thoughts can dwell when I have a moment to myself to think and be quiet ~ to imagining all the beauty that could be possible in my life and surroundings just by my shifting out of judgment and into observation, into peace.
Call to Action: Where are you giving away your chance for peace and blaming somebody else for it? “It’s their fault! If they’d just think like me, everything would be grand!” Notice how you feel when you do this. What happens to you physically? Where do your thoughts go? Is this something you want more of in your life? If not, ask yourself what you can do to shift this pattern in your way of being, then commit to doing so, and do so. Start today.
Remember: The difficult but responsible thing to do is to own and accept that you are the only one that controls what’s going on inside of you and in your life. If it’s less than ideal, only you can change it. As long as you wait for everybody else to change and get their thinking and their act together, you get to be right but miserable. What are you waiting for?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)