Secrets About Life Every Woman Should Know: Ten principles for spiritual and emotional fulfillment. Barbara Angelis De

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ say you are in a relationship with a man. He comes to you one day and announces, “I don’t want to be with you anymore. I am leaving.” Is his leaving you a positive or negative event? The answer is: It is neither. His leaving is neutral. It is just an action. He is walking out. What is positive or negative is how you react inside to his leaving. If you are madly in love with him and think you are meant to be together, you will react with sorrow and conclude that his leaving is negative. If you were tired of him anyway, and trying to figure out a way to break it off yourself, you will react with relief, and conclude that his leaving is positive. Do you see how the same event can be experienced as producing happiness or sadness when in fact, the event isn’t doing anything—it’s your inner state that is producing those emotions, those reactions?

      Here’s another example: You are in a car accident and are seriously injured. You end up having to take a month off from work to stay at home and recover, and your mother, with whom you don’t get along very well, comes to stay and take care of you. “This one is definitely not neutral!” you may be thinking. But look more closely. If you focus on how awful it is that you had the accident, that you are missing work, and that you have to put up with your mother, you will be unhappy and conclude that the accident was a negative event. But what if you take that time to contemplate your life and how fast you’ve been moving, and see that this month was a “forced vacation,” so to speak, in which some higher power is insisting you slow down? And what if you realize that your mother is again able to feel useful in caring for you, in a way she hasn’t for years, and that you are able to receive her love in this form, which is a great gift to her? And what if you allow yourself to feel vulnerable and out of control for the first time in a long while, and notice the harshness of your hard-driving personality softening in a way that is undeniably healthy? Then, in spite of your injury, you might feel a deep sense of well-being, and conclude that the accident was a very positive and, indeed, even necessary event.

      Happiness is a decision you make to experience a situation in a particular way. It is not something that is bestowed upon you from the outside. It comes from the inside out. In the same way, unhappiness isn’t something that is inflicted upon you from the outside—it, too, is a choice you make.

       You are the person with the most power to affect your life. You are the one who decides to be happy or unhappy about what you are experiencing.

      Isn’t this a mind-bending discovery? Isn’t this great news? The happiness you have been looking for is available at any time! It is right here, right now. You have been waiting for something on the outside to trigger your happiness, so you could give yourself permission to experience it, but the ability to be happy has been inside you all along. In fact, happiness can only be attained from within.

       Nothing can make you happy without your permission.

       Nothing can make you unhappy without your permission.

      This is the meaning of Secret Number One: Everything You Need to Be Happy Is Inside of You—that you already possess the power to decide to be happy or unhappy. In this way, you create your own heaven or your own hell, your own contentment or your own misery, from moment to moment.

      Understanding this principle is the first step in becoming emotionally and spiritually free, because you begin to see that what you feel and experience at any time is ultimately up to you. This kind of freedom isn’t something anyone else can give you—it’s the freedom only you can bestow on yourself by living each day from the inside out. Then you start to have true control over your life and your destiny, not by trying to make everything perfect on the outside, but by learning how to tap into your own source of happiness and peace on the inside.

      Who Robs You of Your Ecstasy?

      One of the reasons I made a serious commitment to my spiritual growth when I was still a teenager was that I was fed up with watching my state of well-being go up and down, up and down, depending upon what was happening in my life. No wonder I was so miserable—I felt like a boat without an anchor, or even a rudder, being tossed around by the stormy seas of circumstance. By the time I turned eighteen, I began formally practicing meditation, and I have continued this and other spiritual disciplines for the past thirty years. And at a certain point after I reached the age of forty-five, I thought I’d achieved a pretty steady state of consciousness. I was spending each summer on a spiritual retreat, where I would dive deep into my own inner silence and experience great tranquillity and contentment.

      It was following a summer like this several years ago when suddenly, out of the blue, my life was bombarded by one painful challenge after another, professionally, personally, financially, you name it. It all seemed to hit me at once, like a cosmic hurricane, and no area of my world was left untouched. I remember waking up each morning, my stomach in knots, my heart hurting, not wanting to get out of bed, and thinking, “What happened? Everything was going so well. Where did my peace of mind go?”

      In this state of emotional panic, I called someone very dear to me who is a female monk and meditation teacher. Tears fell from my eyes as I listed all of my personal dramas, tragedies, and dilemmas, each one sounding worse than the one before. She patiently and silently listened on the other end of the phone, and when I was finished, there was a long pause in the conversation. Then, in a very gentle but strong voice she said, “Barbara, who is robbing you of your ecstasy?”

      “Finally,” I thought to myself, “someone who understands what a terrible time I am going through!” and I began reciting names as an answer to her question: “This person is doing this to me, and this business associate did this to me, and this situation is doing this to me.…”

      Again, and more firmly, she asked: “But Barbara, who is robbing you of your ecstasy?”

      Suddenly, I felt as if someone had just thrown a bucket of cold water on my face and woken me up from a deep sleep. “Who is robbing you of your ecstasy?” All at once, I realized the profound truth that lay hidden in what she was asking. I did know how to contact my own happiness, my own ecstasy. Just a few months before, this woman had seen me in such a high, peaceful state, a state based on my own inner joy. Then I’d returned home to a turbulent time in my life, and had allowed people and circumstances to rob me of that experience. In fact, no one was really doing anything to me—I was doing it to myself by deciding that I couldn’t be happy anymore if I had these problems or these situations. I was the cause of my own pain. I was robbing myself of my own ecstasy.

      That phone call had a profound impact on me. In the days and weeks that followed, I looked carefully at my life “story,” and realized that I had been allowing others to rob me of my ecstasy and personal happiness for as long as I could remember. Even though I had never been the victim type who actively and angrily blamed people or situations for my suffering, I did secretly feel that others were the cause of my pain. “If you hadn’t broken up with me, I would still be happy … if you hadn’t tried to cheat me in business, I would still be happy … if this hadn’t happened to me, I would still be happy.”

      Somehow, the words my wise friend had used created a huge shift in my awareness. I was stunned to realize how much power I had been giving others over me without their even knowing it! And that was the key—that I was the one giving away that power, I was the one giving away my own happiness.

       No one else ever robs you of your happiness, your ecstasy. You rob yourself by making your ecstasy dependent upon others.

      Since that powerful conversation with my friend, I have incorporated her question as a part СКАЧАТЬ