It’s important to understand that listing gratitudes is a symptom of a grateful mindset, not the cause of it. If our list contains things that can be taken away — money, people, achievements — then losing them feels like gratitude failed us. But real gratitude is not based on possessions. Real gratitude can be for: Life itself Breath in your body Sound Sight Warmth A moment of peace Anything that…
Children see everything as new, everything is mysterious and they're curious. Adults jump to conclusions, and we're certain, and we already know everything. So to get back to that childlike wonder, we have to focus on the cause of that, which is our comparative mindset. We compare this moment to the last. We compare this thing to the same thing we saw yesterday. But every moment is different. The light…
I think the first step on the path to enlightenment, the 10,000-step path, should be called false enlightenment. Because we have these little glimpses of awakening, and we feel like we’re enlightened, and then someone who is cruel or unkind or unthoughtful pulls us right back down to reality, makes us mad and furious. And instead of realizing we’re not so enlightened after all, we try to cut out everyone…
We were all born into a world full of people competing for their share of wealth and staking their claim. This competition for what seems like limited resources is one of the reasons we now have a mental condition in our society: a compulsive chasing of what I call peak experiences. We see this with billionaires and multimillionaires wanting to go to space for ten minutes. We see it in…
The more obsessed, committed, and certain we become, the further we get from peace, love, and truth. In reality, there are no sides to be taken. There is no good side and bad side. There are no good people and bad people. These are just our minds striving to create mental models of the world. They are illusions. These mental models can be helpful, like when they tell us that…
We are killing the present moment every time we relive a memory, wishing it were now. When we are stuck in the past, when we are reliving our childhoods in our minds over and over again, longing for those simple, better days, this is common when we had an idyllic childhood and maybe our lives turned out differently than we expected. Or we just long for those days that were…
We can put food on the table for our family, we can put a roof over our heads, and we can have every single need met. But if we don’t have a certain number in the bank account that we believe will make us peaceful and happy, we think we need to worry. We think we need to be stressed; we need to be afraid of disaster at any second.…
The first step to becoming happy is realizing how we are making ourselves unhappy. This is very hard to see because we are certain that something outside of us is making us unhappy, that some event from our past is preventing us from being happy, that there is some defect within us that prevents us from allowing ourselves to smile, to love.If we were in a constant state of loving…
We often notice that when people are faking positivity and pressuring positivity, we tend to find that this is really a desperate cry for help. Because they are unable to face reality. They want to face a fantasy. And it’s a fragile and unstable happiness. I’m going to say something a little controversial — but it’s true: toxic positivity doesn’t actually exist. What we usually mean when we say “toxic…
Contentment and satisfaction are the opposite of suffering. When we are fully content, we feel fully fulfilled. And when we are in that state, there is no longing, no craving, no trying to find meaning in life or wondering about our purpose. There is only peace and clarity. And that is the state we're all trying to reach, that lasting happiness.A lot of people think that the answer to contentment…
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