Changing our mindset changes our reality because our reality is created by our perception. The way we see the world, the way we see our life unfolding, determines how we feel about our lives and shapes how we think about the situations happening around us, those we often call “happening to me.”
If we are peaceful, life appears peaceful to us because we stay at peace in our mind. We don’t let anything disturb that peace. We don’t let conflict with reality arise within us, which is one of the root causes of negative experiences.
Truly negative experiences come from a negative outlook. Sometimes, what happens in our lives is undeniably tragic, and we will naturally feel broken. But we do have this one bit of control, this ability that humans still possess in their darkest times: the ability to always accept and make peace with reality.
We can stop creating resistance and inner conflict with reality, which is really what all stress is. It’s that tension in our body that we create. It always comes from this inner battle. Essentially, that fight-or-flight mode gets activated, the stress response kicks in, and all of our muscles tense up. We get very focused on this danger, this threat.
However, the choice of the quality of our presence, the direction of our focus, is always with us. We can make peace with even the most unbearable, unthinkable, and tragic events. I don’t mean that we jump for joy and look like a fool at a funeral, or anything like that. It won’t feel like joy. But it will feel like facing terrible emotions with courage, with confidence, with peacefulness, because that is the choice we made: to face this pain and not to resist it.
We don’t have to create that stress and tension in our body. As hard as it seems, our outlook truly does create our reality. When we are truly happy, we don’t even care if someone was rude to us on the street. We just feel sympathy and compassion.
We can be walking down the sidewalk, smiling and waving to everyone, not caring that only one out of ten people even looks us in the eye. True happiness comes with zero craving or expectations. As soon as there is a craving for someone to smile or wave back, to say hello, then we are subjecting ourselves to inevitable future unhappiness when we don’t get it, when we long for it, or when we cling for too long to the one who did not say hello back. Because now, we’re missing all the others we could have shared our love with, a smile, a hello, a wave.
When we are truly happy, we don’t get angry, jealous, or bitter. We don’t blame or self-blame. Because the moment we let those feelings in, we are no longer happy. Even when negative experiences happen, we take them on with a smile. We don’t have to worry about whether we’ll have the confidence or courage to take on this moment; we just know that we can. Just like we always do. Because we’ve made a practice of accepting each moment as it comes, without resisting any of it. Without letting any of it put that toxin of stress into our body, unless we really need to fight or run away from something.
We’ll be so much happier when we can give up these cravings and expectations and let them go. They bring nothing but misery. We will still, in present moments, sense what is right for us, sometimes it’s pampering ourselves, sometimes it’s challenging ourselves.
Not craving and not expecting things out of life doesn’t mean we become hermits or live in a cave. It doesn’t mean we give up on anything that feels closest to the life we know we should be living. Giving up craving outcomes and expectations simply means we stop resisting when things change, when good things end or when bad things begin.
That inner peace, this practice of constant acceptance of what is in the moment, restores our energy. It preserves it, instead of wasting it on needless worry and tension in the body that clouds our judgment. And with this energy, with this peace that comes from presence, we can tackle any challenge. We can overcome any obstacle. Because there is no longer such a thing as hard work, or struggle, or bad fortune. There is just stuff happening in the present moment that we will deal with as it comes, not beforehand in anticipation, not afterwards for years and decades.
We will realize that we don’t accumulate time. We don’t accumulate moments. And when we let go of the burden of the past and the future, and just look at this moment – honestly, deeply – and respond to it with what needs to be done, life becomes so much lighter.
We don’t have to fear negative experiences, because we know we’re not going to keep them with us. We’ll let them go when they’re over. And this becomes easy when we embrace hard work. Because if we don’t embrace the hard work, which is a fact of every person’s life, then life will be hard.
But when we embrace the work, when we don’t mind the unexpected time-sucks, those wasted hours we didn’t anticipate fixing a problem, crisis, or emergency, then we can actually handle any crisis and emergency.
No matter what kind of life we have, it is guaranteed to have hard work. And the reason I know this is because even if you are very rich, so rich that you have no responsibilities, no work, nothing to do that is challenging in any way, you may still go through immense depression, feeling like you have no purpose, no direction, and that life is meaningless. I’ve seen the bodies waste away, the minds become bitter and angry, and their lives become truly hard.
In every aspect of our lives, we lose the stress that is worrying about an outcome, afraid of failing, and we simply love and live in this moment for itself, to give it the sacred attention it deserves, no matter how bad it seems. No matter how quick our mind jumps to a negative conclusion, no matter how much we want to escape it, we go deeper, until we see past that story, past that cloudy lens of our perception that colors a situation as good or negative. And we wash those glasses by simply accepting what is happening and stopping fighting it.
This doesn’t mean we don’t act. We still lift a car off of our child if that is the emergency. There is no stopping this gut response, this instinct, this higher intelligence that we feel we need to constantly worry and think about, even though it’s there for us without thinking. Without thinking, the mother lifts the car off the child. It’s pre-thought. The thought is secondary.
The thought is simply the mental story we tell about a situation to determine how we feel, in hopes that it protects us from danger in the future. Therefore, we may learn from that thinking and analyzing of the situation I just shared. And we will realize that the mother will also keep a much closer eye on her child anywhere near cars.
But there doesn’t need to be a constant state of fear, because these bodies and the wisdom they contain are so much greater than what our minds can even conceive. We do not understand our own bodies. We don’t understand how they work. We can’t build another one.
And yet, the intelligence of every single cell in our body to communicate with every other cell and to work together to keep us alive is always within us. That’s why we need to get the mind out of the way, because it clouds our vision, our judgment, our understanding, and our wisdom.
Thoughts try to take infinitely vast and complex experiences and interpret them into a sentence or two. This is great for when we are consciously trying to solve a problem and we need our intellect. It’s very convenient when we are trying to make future plans, because we take all of our experience and come down to a single decision.
But beyond the conscious use of our mind for intellectual analysis, what we are doing is always taking an experience of infinite complexity, based on infinite factors that came before it and will come after it, and we are putting it into symbols and sounds that make up words and sentences.
We are taking five pieces of data and tossing out a trillion. And it colors and shapes how we see the world. Therefore, it limits our understanding, our connections and relationships, and that sense of Oneness.
It is that survival instinct from when we were cavemen, designed to tell us fearful thoughts so that we would stay away from tigers and cliff sides, and so we would survive. But it is not reality, not in our modern world. It wants to possess positive, safe things that it experiences forever. And when it’s not happening, when we’re not in that great, safe, positive experience, we long for it. We crave it. And the mind creates suffering.
When undesirable things happen, it resists, becomes angry and agitated, and we let it color our thinking and our mood for days, months, or years. And if these negative experiences keep accumulating, that mind, that thought stream, becomes darker and darker and darker, because we are accumulating our time. But the moment our thinking becomes brighter is the moment the sun starts to appear.
Good things happening will not make us happier. Becoming happy will make good things happen.
When a barista at a coffee shop makes someone’s order wrong, who is a very happy person, they do not care. They do not yell at the barista. They do not get angry or stressed, or lose their temper in any way. But someone who is already angry, who already almost got into a fight in a road rage incident, that person could lose it on the barista. Even that person who we would say has a great life, who has everything, is wealthy, had a family, that person may also totally lose it when a barista gets their order wrong.
Often, it is when we are so accustomed to great things happening, we begin to become so demanding, critical, and impatient.
During my 9-year spiritual journey, I met so many monks who, surprisingly, had the worst lives imaginable. They lost so much. They may have been diagnosed with something terminal themselves. And they chose to live a monastic life. They changed their perspective, and their life changed. And these were some of the happiest people, and most generous, most gracious, grateful, and kind I’d ever met.
Now, we don’t have to go live in a monastery if something bad happens in our life, but we can learn the lesson from them, which is that: Our perception is everything. The way we see the world is the way the world is to us.
We have to realize the incredible power we all have within us, which is to become present and to direct our focus and awareness. And we can always look at the bright side of the dark side. That is the yin-yang symbol, with the black side having a tiny dot of white in it, and the white side having a tiny black dot within it.
Where we put our focus is always up to us. There is always light in the darkness. There is always the sky beyond the clouds. We just have to clean those foggy glasses clouded with craving, expectations, fear, and resistance to what is.
When we do that, and we embrace the hard work of life, we can deal with any negative experience we face. We can do it standing tall, because we are not carrying the weight of eternity on our shoulders. We can do it with peace, presence, and intention, with more energy, with more wisdom to succeed and overcome.
