All of us get stuck at times. We feel sad, frustrated, irritated, sad or overwhelmed. All of these prevent the other emotion that we so want to feel - happy!
Stress, anger, sadness… Where do these emotions come from?
Do they come from facts, or from the meaning we attached to the facts?
Take an example of a downturn in economy. One person might interpret it as “Oh Gosh! I’ll be broke” and feel all stressed out. Another might interpret it as, “Oh I need to be more creative to stay relevant”
It’s all about meanings.
You can live your life as a loss or as a wonder. Emotions follow the choice.
Human mind is guided by primary survival instincts and is constantly looking for what will go wrong and how they may make me lose.
See there is a trap that keeps you from being happy.
Let’s take a very personal example. Consider a woman who was adopted as a baby. She can build up a perfect story that no one loves her and so she had to be adopted. She can also take an opposite view that she was so special that a family fell for her. The meaning that she chooses affects her entire life.
Can you change the expectation of loss into an anticipation of wonders. That one change changes life instantly.
You see nothing happens to you. You aren’t so important to anyone that they’d want to do things to you. Thats all a made up story. But things do happen. Your mind, lost in its amazingly built up relevance, thinks the world conspires against you. You must be so damn important for the world to be conspiring, right?
Do you see a pattern here?
It’s all about a quest to be relevant. But you aren’t. No one is. And then we attach meaning to situations. Fiction.
If you ever want real freedom, you have to decide to stop allowing events to shape your emotions.
That is only done by finding empowering meanings and not ridiculing meanings.
Which story is guiding your life, are you the one that life is unjust too or are you the one to whom wonderful things are waiting to happen?
Answer the question and you why you feel the way you do.
Chetan