After a period of daydreaming, I had an ‘a-ha’ moment one evening, whilst drinking a cup of chai tea, sitting down comfortably next to the fire. It was all to do with the source of your peace and joy… It would be criminal not to share.
It’s so simple and easy … you may think it’s TOO simple and easy, but, I would like to take this opportunity to very conveniently quote something by our old friend, Einstein:
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”
Based upon this theory, I will attempt to reveal to you the one and only piece of information you need to know to allow peace into your lives. Without peace, there is no platform for joy or happiness either, so this ‘secret’ is good to know to experience them all.
Whether you feel joy or sadness is really down to the dominant thoughts that occur within your mind. The mind is solely responsible for the processing and filtering of the outside world, as well as your inner mental state and the feelings you are feeling. It is never directly down to your external environment, or the actions of others, that you feel any kind of emotion, whether it be positive or negative. Your state of peace and joy is always dependent upon your reaction to those external circumstances.
To feel peace suggests the need for stillness and balance; it implies the dilution of the reactionary elements of our behaviour. Without these conditions, attempting to achieve peace is comparable to the attempt at achieving still water in a pond by throwing pebbles in it! Peace can not be achieved without stillness of the mind, and the identification of that which disturbs it. Therefore, peace (and its counterparts joy and happiness) is not a goal to reach per se but rather a background STATE to be in. This state is directly governed by the impact of our thought processes on our minds.
So, what then, governs our thought processes?
There are only 2:
…mix these together in the ‘pot‘ of your mind and there you have it – the thoughts responsible for your ‘state’ of being at any given moment.
Unless of course you can somehow ‘detach’ from it all.
Think less, feel more. What really causes disturbance to our peace, and therefore the subsequent creation of negative thinking patterns, are thoughts that interfere with, or prevent the enhancement of, our external experience. Life always occurs in our engagement with the outside. Observation and creative states occur inside. These states are then taken OUT into life to manifest themselves as your current reality. So these interfering thoughts are the ‘pebbles‘ that clip the ‘water‘ i.e. they are the cause of the resistance to life.
Whenever you are in full observation of life, you are always present in the stillness of the moment – in a state of pure awareness; a place of maximum peace and joy. It is also where your intuition communicates with you. The past and future can only disclose themselves as busy thought patterns – hence why they are sometimes considered an illusion of the mind. The idea is to disconnect and unidentify with the thought based activities of the mind regularly in order to become more present and to connect with your true self.
Now at the risk of being found guilty of using clichés, this leads me to this ‘great, big, fat secret‘ for gaining peace, joy and happiness:
Here it is – use the following often …..
Don’t take yourself too seriously.
Simple.
But what does that mean exactly?
By ‘yourself’, specifically, I mean your THOUGHTS. When we get ourselves to a place where we can merely observe thoughts floating in and around our minds, our attitude towards them changes. The thoughts then become no more than just mellow background noise opposed to a circus band in your front lounge.
I always notice in my body first when I feel negative emotion, and when I do, I always stop what it is I am doing for a moment and take a GOOD LOOK at which thought is responsible for interfering with my calm. The thought usually gets the message and sees itself out!
So give it a go today, make an effort to identify the thoughts that go on in your head which stress you out. As soon as you catch the sneaky blinders, just remember that they are responsible for your peace if you choose to let them. Usually, though, you can tell the thoughts or the equivalent ‘hysterical woman upset about chipping her fingernail‘ to look on the bright side and get herself a, metaphorical, cup of tea.
Have a seriously, not so serious day!
‘All delusions begin in the mind. All delusions are based on various ways we are talking to ourselves and then believing what we are saying’
-Adyashanti
Visit me at www.rishajoshi.com
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