| The idea of taking responsibility for your happiness often seems impossible or ridiculous to many people. Many people are determined to blame others for their unhappiness and their problems. If you look carefully at their lives you will see that this blaming does not help them at all and they often feel unhappier as time goes by. Those that decide to take responsibility, to accept it, are more likely to feel happy as time goes by. It is not to say that they do not have moments of unhappiness, discomfort, or pain but they are more likely to return to some sort of peace and happiness if they take resonsibility for that. What does that mean to take responsibility? It means that when you become aware of uncomfortable or bad feelings you recognize that these are an indication that you need to change something within you, not something outside of you. That something is most likely your thoughts and beliefs at any given moment about what is happening around you. It is important to understand that the concepts of good and bad or right or wrong are simply mental ideas, not factual truth. In reality there is nothing bad or wrong. This concept may seem startling or nonsensical but it is the key to understanding how to create the life you want. It is too big of a subject to go into fully right now. We will leave that for later. Understand for now that if you judge what is happening around you or judging someone or yourself as bad or wrong, you will feel unhappy. When you know the truth, which is that everybody is doing the best they can at any given point, it is easier to accept events and let go of judgment and feel better. This doesn't come easily to many people in the beginning. To let go of judgment seems almost impossible. But it is a most important practice. Observe during the day how many times you need to find fault, need to make somebody less good than you, or yourself less good than somebody else. Observe how that leaves you feeling. Does that leave you feeling good? Then try to view the same event or person or yourself from the perspective that they are good and doing the best that they can, and did not intentionally set out to make you feel bad. See if that makes you feel any different. |
