Once you begin implementing this process you open a window for change. You create a space where more good things become possible. Your life becomes more of an adventure because you look for and find more good things to include. You find more good things about yourself. As you begin to look for more good in yourself and others and in the world you actually DO find more good.
When you take moments and transform them by transforming your thoughts and feelings for the better you build a rich reserve of positive feelings. When you feel better and think better more of the time you are in a better mental and physical space to recognize opportunities when you may encounter them. When you are a positive influence and you resonate with positive energy other like-minded people tend to gravitate toward you. As you transform yourself others and the world can respond positively to you.
So someone might say, (counter example) well bad things still happen to good people. This is true. You may be the most positive person, believing in all good things, and some ‘terrible’ calamity may fall you or a loved one. I am not saying the outer world conforms to you. Things still happen, but how you respond to them makes all the difference. How you label actions and events and people makes a big difference. What you glean or learn from these, how you adjust and move forward is all up to you. Your perception about them is what makes them what they are for you.
Choice always exists for you. This is important to understand. Even though your current situation may not be desirable you do not have to choose to be unhappy about it.
I am not stating that you must be happy or stoic about it. I am only suggesting that it is your choice how you respond. If bad things are going to happen anyway why would you ever choose to feel unhappy about it? From the answer you give to that question will learn much about yourself. I am not saying there is a correct answer just examine your answer. What might you learn about you?
If you choose to not let it make you unhappy so be it. If you choose to be unhappy about it so be it. Don’t resist, accept, allow.
If at some point you wish you had made a different choice, my guess is there will be another opportunity at another date.
Celebrate whatever your choice is. You will get further faster by loving and accepting and treating yourself positively than by criticizing, self-loathing and regret. UNLESS these latter feelings catapult you in a positive direction they don’t serve to make you better.
There is a reason for regret. We feel regret so that we don’t repeat whatever we did. If you regret treating a loved one or stranger poorly then stop it. If regret gets you to stop treating someone poorly and begin treating them better, then in this case, regret is a good thing.
It got you to stop so it was an asset. If you can make the change it is positive to do so regret then serves a function. If you cannot do anything at all about it, if the person is dead or long gone, or it is just something you can’t change, then it’s an emotion that doesn’t serve you well in this regard. The same is true regarding guilt.
This is the point in our life when the Serenity Prayer may be useful to consider: ‘Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference’.
Wisdom is more important than knowledge because with a little knowledge you can do great things good or bad. Wisdom is knowing the difference. Again, here is where I think good taste ought to prevail. Make in the best possible interests of yourself and others. Do no harm. Do no harm to others nor to yourself. Instead, love and allow even when you don’t understand. Live and let live. What you resist will persist. Seek the higher way of being.
As I stated, when difficult times arise, acceptance is a worthy response. Sometimes we need to be able to accept and allow and not endeavor to escape or avoid or dictate how something or someone must be.
Acceptance, does not mean becoming a victim or giving up. Acceptance means learning how not to resist. Whatever we resist persists. When we actively fight against something we are IN A fight. It means we are actively engaged in combating something we don’t want. We are focusing on what we don’t want instead of being focused on what we do want.
It is a fine point, subtle but powerful, and we will explore later. For now, let me use this example. Not wanting to be poor is NOT the same as wanting to be rich. Focusing on what you don’t have or lack is NOT the same as focusing on what you want to create or gain or on abundance. Knowing what you don’t want or won’t tolerate sets your limits but it DOES NOT provide you a useful direction to what you do want. It is similar to driving down the road looking in the rearview mirror. It is not useful in getting you where you want to go.
So don’t resist. Don’t give what you do not want any more energy or time. Let it be, accept it for whatever it is, and steer gently from it. Acknowledge whatever is important to acknowledge. Learn from it and when ready move in the direction you actually want to go in.
It is okay to grieve, it is okay to be sad. We all feel these things. All emotions have their place. We are human after all. We don’t have to insist on being otherwise.There’s a season for everything, a time to sow a time to reap, a time to rest.
Don’t force yourself and for goodness sake don’t force others. Allow them to be whomever they are. Do not pressure them to change or be different for you. Don’t place unreasonable demands on yourself or others. Instead, celebrate your differences.
This is where The Serenity Prayer makes a lot of sense so I repeat it: ‘Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference’.
As you become facile with this process it gets easier and easier. It becomes a reliable habit. As a reliable habit you are able to handle more of what life throws at you. Anything may come along and upset you, rain on your parade, ruin your party or downright devastate you, but you will more likely recover quickly and more easily, no matter how difficult it was, by being a positive powerful person. You would only wallow longer if you are a negative person most of the time. Face it, it does rain and shine on the good and the bad.
None of what I am suggesting is about controlling the world or other people rather it is about your relationship to the world, how you move through it. I think we all deserve to make life grand and have it as wonderful as it can be. This means many different things to many different people so I am not drawing any conclusions here.
YOU can make for yourself the life you want to have whether you were born and live with outstanding incredible odds, or whether you were born on Easy Street. You can have the life you choose. The fist step going back to other writing is to conceive of it, Then believe you can have it. We have discussed believing in this blog post for a little bit.
When you become a more positive person you discover more wonderful moments and fewer hardships because you have opened up the possibility to include many more good things into your life. You enrich yourself with positive thoughts, feelings, actions, people and experiences. Like does attract like. Even if crap happens overall your life becomes far more magnificent.
In developing and maintaining a positive outlook, in making positive thinking a habit, you become your own champion thinker and doer. You become a positive resource to yourself and others.
When you stop yourself from traveling the old roadway to the old house, and you take a break, go into neutral and shift your thoughts to positive you move from victim to victor. As a victor, you are better able to handle and resolve the crap that may happen WITHOUT losing your positive focus or momentum. But, if you do lose it, you know how to get yourself back on track and on target. If you do momentarily forget your way to the mansion, you will more easily find it.
Promoting a healthy positive attitude in yourself makes life much better all the way around.
What you absolutely WILL discover when you engage this process is that it gets easier to utilize.
Think about a computer software program. I don’t like the analogy that much, but it returns us to the notion of servo-mechanism. A servo-mechansim does what it is designed to do without caring about the outcome or the content.
Take this writing software program for example. It is designed so you can run any content though it. The program is constructed so you can write and publish but it doesn’t care whether you write well or not, whether you write inspirational material or drivel, whether you write about love or hate. All that is your choice. You determine what you write about.
Our unconscious, or subconscious. or other than conscious (all just words for processes that occur outside of our awareness and in many cases our voluntary control) is the program. It runs on and on. You supply the content it publishes it. So the mechanism is there to return to you whatever you put in it. Recall, GIGO, garbage in garbage out notion. If you dwell on negative thoughts your unconscious finds and supplies you with more of the same, if you dwell on positive thoughts it will find and supply you with more. IT ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT CARE!!! It returns whatever you give it.
Most of us are better at one form of thinking than the other hence the results in our life. Obviously, if we are predominately negative then the world, our life reflects that back. On the other hand, if we are predominately positive, our world, our life reflects that back IT DOES NOT CARE.
The question for each of us is: If we are not happy, ecstatic, with who we are, what we have accomplished and what we have in life then when will we begin to take responsibility to change it for the better? If life isn’t glorious we can do something about it. One thing is certain. If we do nothing about it, it is bound to remain the same. If you do want something better, you can have it. If life is already incredible it can be even more so. Who knows if there is any upper limit on what we could accomplish if we only decided to try and then did not give up.
I have outlined a process in these pages that you can use whenever you discover yourself engaged in thinking or feeling other than how you want to. You do not ever have to do anything with it unless you want to and knowing ABOUT IT will not do anything for you. It is only when you do it and continue to do it that you will benefit.
So if you want a more wonderful life isn’t it time to begin doing something? You don’t have to take my suggestions or word for it you may find another way. Find what works for you. If you do not change something you are doing you will keep getting the same results.
What is it you would like to enjoy more of in your life? What positive things about you might you change for the better? If, you could do or be anything during the rest of your life what would you choose? What if, the next days and weeks and months ahead you became more and more delighted and surprised gradually, and discovered yourself just feeling incredible more of the time, wouldn’t that be cool? Wouldn’t that be worth having for yourself?” Rex Sikes
More next time. In the meantime make every moment miraculous!
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