Hello Everyone! Welcome again! Last week I talked about how humans mostly focus on what’s lacking from their lives instead of being thankful for what they have in their lives. This week I would like to take last week’s old belief a step further and examine it from another perspective.
Belief – I don’t want to say out loud that I am thankful or I am lucky for all the goodness in my life because it could be jinxed the next moment!
A lot of us irrespective of our cultural backgrounds believe in this belief which is filled with fear. Fear of losing what you think is good in your life if you pay attention to it, acknowledge it, be grateful for it. And why do we believe in this belief which has been passed on from generations, because maybe back in the day, not necessarily in our own experiences, someone said out loud about how lucky they were or how grateful they were and whatever that thing that they were feeling lucky for or grateful for disappeared. And that would have created this belief which a lot of people still to this day keep believing and living their lives based on.
However, if you pay very close attention to this kind of fearful thinking, it reveals another aspect. The aspect of lack of trust in the Universe or God or whatever else that you believe in or have faith in. Or do you actually have ANY faith in whatever God or Universe you believe in? At least from the perspective of this thinking, it appears that you don’t. You don’t have faith that everything that has happened in your life so far happened for the best or whatever it is that you are going through today is happening for your best or whatever else that will happen in the future will happen for your best. It will not just be the very best thing for you but also that you will always be okay no matter what the situation or life event. I know this personally very well because like I mentioned in my very first post, we humans create a life plan for ourselves probably when we are very young and when anything doesn’t go according to our plan, we start to question whether there is God or if there is God then why does it seem to be acting against me and my desires. And I honestly think almost everyone, unless you are a saint, will have this kind of thinking at some point in your life when you are at your lowest. And I think it’s very easy to have this thinking because when we are in the middle of a challenging situation, we get caught up in our negative thinking and lose perspective. And we lose perspective because our foundation is weak. And our foundation is weak because we were not brought up to trust the Universe or have faith in God. And this is not a blame on anyone including our parents because chances are they were not raised this way either.
So, let’s re-examine this belief and introduce a new way of thinking and living life. Is it at all possible to open your minds and hearts enough to believe that everything that happens in life happens for the best! It happens so that we can learn and grow and live more fulfilling lives. I know we try to say that ‘whatever happens, happens for the best’ all the time as we are going through challenging situations, however, I don’t think we actually believe it. However, whenever we do repeat this statement and because we don’t believe in it completely, in our minds we are sort of desperately trying to stop thinking and feeling the way we feeling with regard to that challenging situation we are in. And on top of that what we really hope for when we do repeat this statement over and over again is that things will actually change and the situation we are in will go away! But that seldom happens. The challenging situation does go away, eventually, but not because we repeat a statement that we don’t believe in. It goes away when we shift our perspective and look at it from another angle.
Since humans learn best from examples, I want you to imagine a situation where at your current job you have had an amazing boss for several years, however, this amazing boss decides to leave. And now you have been assigned a new boss who is the exact opposite of what your previous boss was. S/he has very high expectations of you but doesn’t really help you to achieve those expectations. Instead insults you and makes you feel very bad that you are unable to meet her/his expectations. So, there are 2 ways of looking at this situation. The first way is that you get very upset and stressed thinking that even though everything was so wonderful for you at work just a few months back, however, now all of a sudden God has brought along this change of boss which is causing you a lot of stress and anxiety. And sometimes when you are very frustrated, you would also think why did this happen to me and why is God being so unfair to me and why does this happen to me all the time etc. etc. On the other hand, another way to look at this situation is to first acknowledge and accept that you have this new situation and understand what is it that you need to do to get yourself out of it. And to get you out of it, there could be two ways of dealing with this change of boss. You can either start to look for another job and/or you can stand up to your boss and let him/her know that you don’t like being insulted and that you deserve more respect even though s/he doesn’t think you are doing a good enough job because that’s what you deserve for being a human.
Having said that, I am not in any way suggesting that you force yourself to NOT feel stressed or frustrated or maybe even hopeless sometimes. Whatever you are feeling is very important to acknowledge and accept and feel, however, once that feeling has passed, try to think from this different perspective. You can implement this with any situation you may be in currently and try it out. In trying out a different perspective, even if you don’t yet believe in it, you still could gain something because even if you are not successful in turning the situation around immediately, you could gain so much confidence in just trying and this could further allow you to try a different perspective more effortlessly and successfully at the next one you face.
One thing that I have learned from one situation after another after another is that we are very quick to tag something as ‘bad’ if we didn’t expect it, or like it or are comfortable with it or if it brings about changes or for a variety of other reasons. However, the one thing that I have also learned from facing these situations is that there is ALWAYS a very important reason for it. On a very deep level, every situation that you face is there to raise your level of consciousness. And that’s all we are here on earth to do…to raise our levels of consciousness so that we can live amazing lives while we are here. More on this another time.
And finally, as always, you are more than welcome to leave comments if you feel like leaving one. Until next Friday, live life 🙂
