Tag: emotions

On Patterns

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

I find I keep having the same thoughts over and over again. I also find I am repeating some of the same behaviours too and like I am stuck in a pattern. How do I change this?

Sincerely,

Pitter Pattern

Dear PP,

When you say you are stuck in patterns, essentially you are saying life has become repetitive. When life becomes repetitive, it is impossible to be receptive. Without receptivity, there really is no life.

So how to stop being repetitive? How to break patterns?

The first thing is recognizing the patterns. It seems at some level, you are doing this. That is fantastic!

The next thing is to understand why we created these patterns at all. If you observe nature, you will see, everything is happening in cycles. The earth around the sun, the trees shedding and growing, even the cellular functions in you are all following cycles or patterns.

The same is true for your thoughts, your emotions, your energies. It is not only the physiology that is like this. But why is it so?

Whenever you perform anything unconsciously, it will be cyclical in nature. That is the default state of existence. Things are always ebbing and flowing from one state to another. What you call as birth and death is simply a cycle, happening ad infinitum, to all things in this cosmos.

We may call it by different names – a flower blooming and wilting, rain pooling and evaporating, etc. But essentially there is only one cycle: birth and death.

This is the fundamental law all things in this universe follow. So when you move through life without consciousness, simply reacting to everything, of course you will be stuck in this pattern.

When I say you are reacting to everything, I don’t mean that you are getting upset about everything. I mean that you are not consciously choosing how you wish to be. You are not responding. Responding is the opposite of reacting.

You see, to be a human being means that you have the ability to think, feel, and act however you wish. If you don’t harness this, then you will be like every other creature, simply reacting to everything based on your programming.

But if you choose in any moment to respond, then the cycle is broken! It is really that simple.

The beautiful thing about all these patterns and cycles you are endlessly repeating is that you don’t actually have to do anything to stop them. If you simply just stop – stop feeding them, stop encouraging them, stop enabling them – they will slough off on their own.

All these patterns are only happening because you have left nature with no choice. You are a conscious human being, the very peak of evolution on this planet. But when you don’t exercise that consciousness, nature falls back on its cycles.

So the good news is this isn’t all that complicated. If you were someone who didn’t even know you were stuck in a pattern, it would be much harder to help you. But when you are aware that things are cyclical, all you have to do is stop and they go away.

Haven’t you noticed that these things take a tremendous amount of effort on your part to maintain? They may feel like they are running with a mind of their own, but it is only because of their momentum. If you just slow it down and stop it, it’s over. In that emptiness, you can choose what you want to do different, if anything.

The problem isn’t with the behaviour or the thoughts. The problem is they are repeating over and over and you want to be in control of them, not the other way around. Even if you have the same thoughts and behaviours, so long as you are the one choosing them, it’s not an issue.

The more conscious you become, the more these patterns will shed. The more conscious you become, the more aware you will be of how many patterns you are stuck in. Believe me, it is far more than you can imagine.

Just try it for even 1 hour – do everything consciously. It will be extremely difficult. When you can finally understand that the majority of your life is happening unconsciously, it will dawn on you that most of your life you are just running on auto pilot. You aren’t really living your life at all.

To be alive means that you are conscious, aware, involved. To break unconscious patterns, all you have to do is increase the effort into responding to life. Respond to everything. Everything is your responsibility.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise.

On Being Flexible

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

I have a hard time being flexible to things I don’t enjoy in life. I get caught up in my preferences and become unhappy. How can I become more flexible?

Sincerely,

Infuriated and Inflexible

Dear IAI,

Let’s say your body is stiff. How did it become that way? You took certain actions and the result is stiffness, no?

Similarly, in the mind rigidity can happen. It to is just a consequence of certain actions.

A flexible mind will make for a flexible life. But you cannot force the mind to be flexible. You must create the right conditions, then, flexibility is inevitable.

Have you ever noticed that when you are joyful, you are very flexible? You are willing to do just about anything. But when you are unhappy, you will draw a line in the sand and put up a wall. This is all that is happening.

You can’t do anything to become flexible to things you don’t enjoy. It is impossible. Flexibility requires your joy. Simply, you must enjoy life, whatever it brings. But right now you have made yourself such a way that your happiness depends on everything except you.

Take a deep look – you become happy only if something external goes the way you want. You got the job you wanted, you got a compliment, the person you like gave you attention. Only then are you happy. This is ultimate slavery, isn’t it?

When your happiness is manufactured within you, why are you seeking it outside of yourself? When you have a bank account with millions of dollars in it, why would you suddenly start looking for pennies on the street?

This is all that has happened to you. You think that happiness comes from the outside. So you have made preferences – I like this situation, so I am flexible. I don’t like this situation, so I am rigid. Your preferences are the very basis of your enslavement.

Am I saying you must become some kind of freak, loving torture and misery? No, I am simply saying that whatever life brings you, no matter how challenging it is, you must learn to be happy of your own nature.

Your happiness should be independent of the circumstance. You see, if you have a difficult situation, it is already bad enough. But now you become unhappy about it, so you are rigid. What was one problem has now multiplied.

You cannot control what life gives you, but how you carry what it gives you is entirely up to you. Will you carry it joyfully? Or will you resist it, fight it, suppress it? The deeper you bury it, the more it will grow.

Become open to life. No matter what it throws at you, simply be happy with it. Don’t mind whether it’s good or bad or easy or difficult. Just be happy to be here, alive, breathing. It is simply a matter of perspective.

If you truly care about your well being, then just change your outlook. When life is good you can enjoy it. When life is difficult, you can strive to grow and learn and enjoy that also. What’s the big issue?

When is there ever a good reason not to be pleasant and joyful about life? In easy times, definitely you want to be joyful. In difficult times, you need it even more don’t you?

You multiply your problems in life and exaggerate them when you become unhappy. This is why I say to practice being joyful. I’m not saying walk around smiling like a grinning idiot at everything, just that there is always something worth celebrating in every moment.

Joy too is just a consequence. Accepting life as it is is the practice. You cannot force joy by saying to yourself “I am joyful, I am joyful!!!!”

When you learn to not have preferences, to simply take whatever life gives you and go with it, ease becomes inevitable. When ease is there, the system will be joyful, be it body or mind. When you are joyful being flexible is natural.

So don’t try to force flexibility. If you force a muscle to become flexible when it is rigid, all that will happen is you will damage it. So you cannot become flexible in the mind when you are unhappy. You will just torture yourself.

Instead, simply learn to accept the moment as is, appreciating it. The rest will follow.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise.

On Consciousness

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

You often talk about doing things consciously and how that’s the difference in life. But what is consciousness? How can we be more conscious?

Sincerely,

Confused About Consciousness

Dear CAC,

Consciousness is not really that complicated. The only issue is most people are confusing how alert they are for consciousness. Alertness is about survival – using your senses in a keen way to ensure your safety. But alertness is not a requirement of life. I’m sure you have seen many unalert people somehow manage to survive!

Consciousness is simply always on. It is a requirement for life to even exist. Or rather, consciousness is life; they are not separate.

If it is always on, the only question is how intense it is. How conscious you are determines how alive you feel, doesn’t it? When you are asleep, you are still technically alive and conscious – but it has been dialed down so much that you become unaware of so many things. Your experience of life becomes practically nonexistent.

Inversely, the more consciously you perform any activity in life, the higher your level of experience. It’s like turning up the speaker to 11 – then you get the maximum effect.

Even the most seemingly mundane things in life can become fantastic and beautiful simply by your level of involvement.

The only issue is that you have a psychological drama going on in your head. By it’s very definition, anything psychological is only ever something you made up, or at best, it is an inaccurate interpretation. Either way, you are not seeing life as it is.

Through this filter, you see things based on so many idiotic preferences – I like this, I don’t like that, that is red, that is blue, this is big, that is small. I want you to please let this sink in – none of those conclusions are real. Those conclusions have no meaning.

The truth is, life itself has no meaning at all. Meaning is something that can only be created in your mind, it does not exist independently of you. Life has no meaning, but life is phenomenal. Those two statements coexist in no contradiction.

It is not meaningful that the sun rises every morning – but it is phenomenal. It is not meaningful that even a tiny speck of dust can be examined infinitely – but it is phenomenal. Your life is not meaningful in any way – but it is phenomenal.

When you were a child, you were like this. Everything was just fantastic! Every stick on the ground, every leaf on the wind, just about every damn thing had your undivided involvement and attention.

But somewhere along the way, you traded this all for conclusions about everything. Somewhere, you decided that life isn’t good enough as is, so you gotta be the one who will pin it down and define it better. Life will not let you get away with such nonsense.

When you are stuck in your silly ideas about life, you instead carve up the universe, deciding what is meaningful and what isn’t. The only reason you get such stupid ideas is because you have gotten too attached to your memory.

Through your memory you draw all your idiotic conclusions – what you like and dislike is only because of what you remember. But memory itself is not a bad thing. Without memory, you would never be able to evolve and learn, constantly falling for the same traps endlessly. That would be a truly cruel existence.

Consciousness is essentially this – do you use your memory as a solid foundation, or do you carry it on your back like a burden? The more you dial up your consciousness, the more loosely you cling to your memory, and the greater your experience of life.

If you can keep some distance between your memory and you, then you will use it instead of it using you.

So how to dial up your consciousness? How to shed this attachment to memory? The beautiful thing about life is that if you simply stop polluting yourself with so much garbage and stop clinging to it like it’s precious, it will shed itself.

It takes tremendous effort on your part to cling to all this memory. You carry it all on your back; that takes a huge amount of involvement from you! By simply stopping from piling on more, it will fluff off.

If you just become more involved in life, then you don’t have to actively shed your attachments to memory or try to be conscious. Just in every little way, become an active participant in your life! Whether it’s sweeping the floor or raising a child, treat it with the same level of intensity and involvement.

If you treat each moment of life like this – that it is all equally precious – consciousness is not an issue. It is an inevitability. The only rub is, it won’t happen on it’s own.

The opposite of consciousness is reactivity – you will compulsive react to everything in life, like a slave to your own programming. To break this enslavement is the only real choice you have in this existence.

But life won’t make you more conscious by accident. You have to decide, in this moment and each moment, how involved will you be? That is what it means to have free will, to be human. It’s not about what you choose. It’s simply that you consciously choose it.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise.

On Introverts

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

I would classify myself as an introvert. But in today’s society, it’s really hard to succeed when you’re an introvert. Only extroverts really are successful, but I don’t know how to change. How can I become more extroverted?

Sincerely,

Intro Invert

Dear II,

Why do you limit yourself so? What is the use in giving yourself such a definitive label, “I am an introvert”?

This isn’t that being an introvert is limited. Even if you proclaimed “I am an extrovert”, it would still be a limitation. The very nature of a limitation is that it is a boundary. Every time you classify yourself conclusively, you put a limitation down on your potential.

Life has given you no such ceiling. You have infinite potential to explore. Making or adopting labels for yourself is like purposely imprisoning yourself.

Isn’t it true that you are not always an introvert? Sometimes, don’t you display characteristics of an extrovert? Maybe these days you have spent so long believing you are introverted that you don’t see any extrovert qualities. But just think back to when you were a young child. Sometimes were you introverted, other times were you extroverted?

People aren’t inherently one way or another. Good or bad, nice or mean, introvert or extrovert. They are always swinging from one to the next. There are not introverted or extroverted people. There are just people, who display qualities from one moment to the next.

Depending on the situation, we can choose how we wish to be. If external success is important to you, then you need to act accordingly. But there is no such rule as introverts can’t be successful.

Just drop this whole nonsense of defining yourself. You are you. You are a unique potential that can only blossom in one way: your way. You cannot be someone else, or go by some other person or textbook’s definition of you.

I don’t say go your way as a means to give you some inflated confidence. “My way or the highway!” is not what I mean. What I am saying is you must explore who you are and what it means to be you. No one else can do that for you or tell you what you are capable of.

You see, every life in this existence is unique. Every moment is unique! There has never been a moment like this one in existence, and there never will be again. Just like that, there has never been someone like you who can do what you could do, and there never will be again. That is the nature of life.

Perhaps being you means you aren’t going to earn a million dollars, or wear a suit and get a promotion, or whatever else you see as success. But it could mean you do something no other human being has ever done before.

Don’t look at your life in terms of material success. Whatever you accumulate around you is not your life. They can add something interesting to it, but essentially, your life is only as good as your inner experience.

Rather than trying to define yourself in narrow ways, as an introvert or extrovert, as a man or a woman, by your race or culture…simply just spend time trying to blossom yourself. Do what feels right for you, just do it well and with absolute dedication and focus.

There are any number of people out there have taken seemingly odd things and been successful. There are people who carve rocks, paint leaves, create their own instruments out of garbage…like this, countless people. They did not become successful because they had some fantastic idea. They became successful simply because they devoted themselves to what they were doing.

When we see a success, we are not impressed by the fact they can hit a golf ball or whatever. We are impressed because we understand that to be that proficient at anything takes a tremendous amount of devotion to the process.

So don’t ask how to be successful or how to become more extroverted. Simply drop all these labels. Just look at yourself. What makes you happy? What brings you beauty and joy? How is it you want to express this life that you are?

Whatever you decide to do, do not worry about success. Just simply dive into the process, with absolute devotion. Be dedicated, consistent, focused, in love with it! Results will come for sure. How can they not?

Society has taught you to be goal oriented. Always chase some pursuit, and change whatever you need to change to get there. But where the hell are you trying to get to? Even if you reach the target, again you will look for another.

But if you devote yourself to the process, it is an end within itself. There is nowhere to reach, you are already there, every step of the way. It stops being about achievement and starts being about expression.

So express your life beyond classifications. Simply look at what you truly wish to do, it doesn’t matter what it is. Then do it, as fully and involved as you can. Now ask me, does it matter if you are an extrovert or an introvert? Such thoughts will not even come up  for you.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Harmony

~ SE ~ 1 Comment

Dear True Self,

How can I live a more harmonious life? Be more in harmony with others?

Sincerely,

One Part Harmony

Dear OPH,

Words like “harmony” get thrown around a lot. There are so many buzzwords that people use when they are working on their spirituality. Even spirituality is a sort of buzzword!

Why I am saying this is because I want you to take whatever definition you have about harmony and throw it away. I don’t care if the definition is correct even, I want you to just drop it entirely.

Did you drop it? Are you willing to just be open, and hear what harmony actually means?

It is important that you are open, because if you are not receptive, then you cannot receive. I don’t want you to even compare your definition to what I am about to tell you and say “See, I was right!” or “Yeah, my definition was similar!”. I don’t want you to compare it all. Just fresh, as if you have never heard about it before, experience it.

Harmony is a certain arrangement. Music has harmony. And music is just sound. If the sound isn’t arranged properly, then we experience it as noise. But if we arrange sounds in a certain way, we call it music. If those sounds are arranged in a mathematically perfect way, we call that harmony.

In many ways, the harmony you are looking for in your life – it’s just a certain arrangement of your energy with other energies. It’s like making music. It’s how you are compatible with the life around you. Do you compliment it or are you creating dissonance?

It could be the people you know, the environment, the work you do, whatever. But if you are living in harmony, then you find a way to arrange your energy so that you are working with others, not against.

When I say energy, I don’t want you to start imagining all kinds of fanciful things. I’m not talking about some big secret divine cosmic energy. Just simply put, all things are energy, are they not? All matter is just energy, at it’s fundamental form. And all that energy is just manifesting as patterns.

Over here, there is energy in the pattern of a rock. Over there, it’s in the pattern of a bee. Over there, it’s you or me or your cat. But it’s all essentially just energy.

Now you do not have the skill or the ability to reshape your energies and suddenly become something else. But all the processes that are happening within you are energy based.

Your body, your thoughts, your emotions – these are the three dimensions of life for sure you can say you have experienced. You might talk about soul or spirit or something but the truth is you cannot ever prove that. So let’s just stick to those three.

Those three dimensions also are just energy arranged in a certain way. What I mean by this is your thoughts, your feelings, your words, your actions – these are the musical notes. They must all be singing the same song, or all you will have is noise.

When someone sings a harmony, they are a supporting role, you know? The singer is doing the main melody, but you come in and enrich it all by supporting. Like this you can make harmony, supporting others with all that you are.

In every thought, word, deed, you must strive to make life a more beautiful and peaceful experience. This universe is not at some big struggle, so why are you?

Everything is happening following the path of least resistance. Like this too, you must move through life, joyfully, easily, gratefully. That is harmony.

But you have been conditioned to do the opposite. Since you were a child you were taught to compete with everyone and everything. You measured your worth only by someone else being less than you. You had to be first at everything to feel value.

Can you possibly ever be at ease with life if you are always at odds with it? If you are endlessly competing and comparing yourself to everyone and everything, there is no hope for the path of least resistance. Harmony will never come. It will always elude you.

So I’ve talked about your energies and now you might think you can go sit and imagine your energies flowing out like a fountain or something. That’s all fine if it makes you feel better, but I want you to understand that the fastest way for you to achieve harmony is not through some psychological fantasy. It is through experiential reality.

Psychological things have no basis in reality. They only happen in your head. Put your attention to how you are and how that affects the life around you.

Okay, so how to do that? Well, you cannot practice making your energy more harmonious. What you can do however, is drop this compulsive nature you have towards competition. This is the real poison in your system. You must remove this poison so the energy can move freely.

The energy of your life or this universe doesn’t need your assistance in order to find harmony. That is the basic principle of energy, is that it always will settle to where it is at ease. It will always naturally find harmony. All it needs is for you to stop interfering with it. For most, that means when they die!

While you are alive you must learn how to live harmoniously. So that means stop competing. Stop basing the value of your life only in comparison to another. Just be happy and grateful for your own life.

You are lucky to be here, as you. In all the history of the universe and the unwritten history to come, there will never be another you. Only you can live your life. It is unique, and it is yours. It is better to be a bumbling version of yourself than a perfect version of someone else.

Harmony is just how you are working to support others, not how everyone else is supposed to help you.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Being the Witness

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

How do I resist the compulsive thoughts and emotions I have? I’m tired of being a slave to all these reactive behaviours, but have a hard time keeping them at bay.

Sincerely,

Resistance is Futile

Dear RIF,

You cannot resist thought or emotion. The goal of resisting something is to prevent it from happening. Only the opposite is possible when you resist thought and emotion.

When we say thought and emotion, you must understand they are the same thing. They follow the same pathways in your system. The only difference is thoughts can turn on a dime. Emotions linger.

You can think your friend is wonderful today and horrible tomorrow, even if they do nothing. Thoughts are like this.

Emotions however get you more entangled and take some time to subside. If you feel madly in love with someone, even if they break your heart and you hate them, still you will go on loving them while hating them, torturing yourself, won’t you?

So your thoughts and emotions are only different in this way. But have you noticed what happens when you try to resist either?

I tell you not to think of something, that is all you will think of. You are angry and I tell you “Calm down, stop being angry!”, you will only become more angry.

Resisting your thoughts and your emotions is a useless battle you will always lose. In fact, by resisting you are actually helping the thoughts and emotions grow more rapidly.

You must understand that once something happens, it is inevitable. It is done. There is no changing it.

What I mean is, if right now, you feel scared, you cannot change the fact that you feel scared in this individual moment. All you will do is say to yourself “Don’t be scared” and the fear will grow and follow you from that moment to the next and the next.

Like this everything is happening between cause and effect. Your compulsions led you to feel or think whatever you are feeling or thinking in this moment. Now it is too late. The compulsion was the cause, the effect is your thought or emotion. You must accept that it has arrived and not try to change or fight it.

“But True Self, I don’t want to be stuck feeling or thinking these things, if I do nothing then they will just stay!”

Actually, you are wrong. Doing nothing is the only way to make them go away.

Everything has it’s time and will pass. Nothing lasts forever. If you simply leave your thoughts and emotions alone, they will pass on their own. It requires no action from you.

Suppressing it will be a disaster. Feeding it will be a disaster. So just leave it and let it run it’s course. You will see that if you can just allow things to happen for what they are, they are not as big a deal as you think.

You are afraid that if you leave them alone that you will go on forever being stuck in the compulsion. There is nothing to fear. Just let it go.

You must stop identifying so heavily with your thought and emotions. They are a tool, here to serve you in this life. But right now all your compulsions have made them the main event and you have become enslaved.

If you want to be free of this enslavement, you must become the witness to these phenomena. Just simply observe what is happening. You are angry? Just watch and see how that feels, what it stirs up. You have a negative thought? Just watch and see what that does to your experience.

Without judgment, like this just simply be the witness. You will be amazed how quickly these things that once dominated you just fade into the next thing.

You are not your mind or your emotions. You may think you are, that you are operating from this brain space or heart space, but you are not. If I ask you, who is running this being you call as “you”, eventually you will just have to admit there is some force within you, the supreme “You”, that is beyond body and mind. Your consciousness is this witness, your true self.

So practice being in that space of simply witnessing. By not suppressing or feeding the compulsions, they will fall off on their own in their own time. The trick is that you don’t get to pick and choose what falls off. Whatever falls off just falls off when it is done.

But eventually, so much of these old patterns and compulsions will be gone. You will feel a huge burden is off of you and you can simply be, in a way that you haven’t felt in a long time. The fastest way to drop your nonsense is to stop feeding it.

It’s kind of like you have a clogged tub and the water is overflowing. Only a fool will grab a mop first. First you must turn off the water and stop feeding the flow.

So stop obsessing so much over your compulsions. Just watch, not for anything, but just for the sake of watching. Be the witness.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Forgiveness

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

How can I be more forgiving? I find when people wrong me severely I cannot forgive them. It feels like I am letting them get away with it.

Sincerely,

Forgive Me Not

Dear FMN,

Have you heard the saying “forgive and forget”?

You must never forget. To forget is not something to strive towards.

Tell me, if you could have a good memory or a poor memory, which would you prefer? Only if you have too many traumatic memories would you want to forget. But if your life was exuberant, you would want to remember every last detail, would you not?

You must understand that you should remember everything – All the wonder, all the joy, all the bitterness, everything in between. Just because you are capable of remembering does not mean you have to dwell on the past.

If you have the capacity to remember, you will be better suited for what life throws at you. You know this and have lived this for sure. Without a good memory, what is the use of practicing anything?

The problem is you don’t use your memory to make intelligent decisions. Instead you dwell on the past – the way you felt, the pain, the trauma. Rather than learn and grow, you simply wish to punish or avoid. You hold grudges.

But there is worse crime than living in the past. Premeditating your actions is much worse.

You see, you don’t forgive people because it changes your actions. Action is always dependent on the situation you are in. You forgive people because you know that if you don’t, you carry the pain that was caused with you everywhere.

The forgiveness is never about the other person. The forgiveness is for your own sake always. Forgive the other so that you don’t carry them with you wherever you go.

What I am saying is forgiveness is freedom.

You may think forgetting them will accomplish this, but it will not. If you forget, you will go on doing the same stupid things over and over, putting yourself in the same situations, hurting yourself again and again.

When we are hurt, we want to justify the hurt. We think that if we plan out how we would be, that it will bring us justice. This is not about justice. This is just that without forgiveness first, there can be no proper action.

So do not premeditate your actions. Every situation is unique, every moment requires it’s own approach.

When you decide before something happens how it should happen, you rob the moment and everyone in it from the countless possibilities available. Who are you to decide ahead of time how everything should be, when every person has limitless potential?

Let’s say today a friend hurts you. Maybe today the correct course of action is to restrain him. Maybe tomorrow he hurts you again. Maybe this time the right move is to embrace him. Maybe he hurts you one more time, and this time the correct response is to punish him.

You must never have it made up in your mind ahead of time “if this person does X, I will do Y”. Life does not work like that.

Instead, simply forgive, then act. If your bitterness or resentment is not involved, you will act with a clear mind and heart and only do what is necessary. If bitterness or resentment is fueling your actions, you will behave in even more hurtful ways.

So how to be more forgiving so you can act with a level head?

To be forgiving will seem impossible if you try to come up with reasons why the other deserves to be forgiven. Turn inward. This is about your mental, physical, and emotional well being after all.

So make forgiveness about you. Remember that every time you become reactive, wanting to blame the other and seek your justice, forgiveness is the necessary first step.

Forgive the other in your heart because they have damaged you enough already. To do any less gives the other even more power to hurt you.

Forgive them because you deserve to move on.

Above all, forgive them because if you act from a space of hurt, all you will cause is more hurt in this world. You will become just like those that hurt you, and I know that is the last thing you want.

Forgive, do not forget. Don’t dwell or grudge, just don’t forget. Then, act as the situation demands. That is the way of a mentally and emotionally intelligent person.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise.

On Reactivity

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

I find I am a very reactive person. I have a short fuse, get defensive easily, and rarely think before I act. How can I calm down and act more stably?

Sincerely,

Nuclear Reacter

Dear NR,

No matter what happens in your life, you are always, in a way, reacting to it. That is the way the universe is made: for every action, and equal and opposite reaction. The very casual nature of our existence is built upon this.

But reacting is not the right word. If I could change this one axiom, it would be to say that everything responds to everything. It is only human beings who are reacting.

Let’s say you are at work and a customer yells at you – how quickly do you react? In what way do you react? Typically, this is a knee-jerk reaction of anger or rage.

Is this how you would like to be in this moment? If that was your last moment on this planet, how would you want to be within yourself? Surely you at least don’t want fear and rage. You will never control the outside circumstances, but how you are is 100% in your capability to master. It is just that you have never practiced.

If you could choose, the next time someone is nasty to you, how would you respond? Pretend you are a complete master over your mind and emotions, how would you like to be in that moment?

But it’s not just this one example. In all moments of your life, if you had full mastery over your thought and feelings, how would you make them? The answer of course is you would always want to have the most pleasant experience. But this is never an option in the realm of reactivity. Thoughts and feelings have enslaved you when they should be yours to use.

So how to gain this mastery over our reactions? Responding to life is the only way. This means consciously and consistently, in each moment, you choose how you want to be. It’s that simple.

For too long you have left the system on autopilot. You occupy your thoughts with past memories or future fantasies. But right here, right now, you are capable of creating a joyful experience within yourself! Why are you so fixated with the creations of your mind when the most important creation in your life – you – is not experiencing the best life it can?

This has nothing to do with what you do outside of life. When I say life, I do not mean your work, car, money, spouse, pets, etc. These are all fine, nothing wrong with them. But they are not your life. They are just things in your life. They are all temporary. Your life is just this: You. It’s the only thing that stays with you till the end. Isn’t it time you gave yourself some attention?

No magic event is going to come into your life that makes it beautiful. Here and there, once in a while, life will throw you something you deem is beautiful. But until you start choosing how you want to be in each moment, you will never create this life into what it can be. The truth is, life can be anything you want it to be, if you’d only strive for it.

It has never worked in your life that simply running on reactive mode could produce lasting beauty for you. Only when you have consciously took strides in your life has it done so. But the work is not to be done outside of you. Simply turn inward and practice changing your self talk and story.

Practice responding to life. Every time you react, instead ask yourself if that’s how you want to be. This is all it takes. The customer yells at you, practice patience or practice assertiveness – it doesn’t matter what you choose. But you must choose and do it. Just know that pleasant choices for both parties will always produce the best result for you. There is no way to only be unpleasant outward; it affect you too. They may still act nasty, but that doesn’t matter. You be the way you want to be and the way you want others to be.

Eventually, life will make it easy for you, and responding will take no effort. But continue to be reactive, and your whole life will be a large effort with very little fruit to bear. The time has come! Create yourself the way you want!

With gratitude,

Your True Self

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