Friday, May 16, 2014

What's on your mind?



Wouldn’t it be nice if whatever happens around us didn't keep bothering us for longer than it needed to?  A mosquito bites you and you feel the pain and irritation for some time and after that you are okay. Suppose all the annoyances of this world affected you only to the extent of the damage they have caused.

Why do we not get emotional about it? We could be saying things like–“Oh! That mosquito bit us and sucked our blood, inflicted pain, itching, and swollen redness. What wrong did I do to that mosquito? Why that mosquito bit me when there are many other animals and human beings? Why am I always a victim of mosquito? Is this my destiny or karma that mosquitoes always feed on my blood?"

Are our miseries really true? It is one thing to push things under the carpet or go into denial of facts about our situation and it is another to make it an ongoing repetitive drama in the mind. Most of us love these sad situations so much that our mind doesn’t want to let go of the negative things. It gets a certain pleasure by analyzing or demanding from a position of being so negative. The fact can be as small as a mosquito bite or as big as a tragedy.

Actually when it is a tragedy or an emergency, mind starts functioning in better ways.  We are more in present moment when we had a great fall or an accident or in case of emergency. Our hidden capacities to find solutions, show empathy and love surface when things go out of control. It is because we have no choice but to accept that something bad just happened and because of the urgency of that situation an action has to come spontaneously right then, so we can't be but one hundred percent present in the moment with the event.

However, our mind can keep chewing on all those smaller, minor, mundane, insignificant things that do not need our urgent action making mountain out of molehill, going into bouts of negativity or even depression. Sometimes it can make them appear a significant part of our identity if they signify a phenomenon, pattern or belief we have about anything in general. 

Most of the life's problems are very simple and can be tackled at their level. They can be solved with simple solutions. There is something we could do when we face such a small irritating problems -

1. Accepting that there is a nagging problem but understanding its capacity and keeping it where it belongs.

2. Not confusing one nagging problem with the other. Really separating what the concern is from the mesh of varying emotions and feelings one might have as a result of many different problems.

3. Not generalizing the problem or making it eternal and basing every future action on that faulty judgment.

4. Deciding what we want to do with it- deal with it later, deal with it now or let time solve it? Many times these problems sort themselves out.

5. Taking that first rate limiting step towards solving it.

6. Accepting that we are feeling “insert any negative feeling” and move on from there to feeling better. Realizing that it is okay to feel horrible but it is not reasonable to keep feeling horrible. So taking that first step towards feeling good, whatever that might be (other than running away, going into another trap that will backfire or going on and on about this problem with someone) would be good starting point.

7. Maintaining happiness by consistently doing those things that make us feel good. We may think since we felt good on Christmas, on some beach with someone, the source of happiness was that place, time, person or situations around it. That may partly be true but this feeling of good came from within us. Other things may be supportive of it yet this feeling comes from within us. Familiarity brings happiness but it can be boring too.

8. Expanding our view of world, people, and how things work. Usually we think that only we are going through a particular situation in life because “insert things to be blamed.” But if we opened up a little more by going out of our comfort zone, really knowing people, places, culture, emotions and situations, we would come to an understanding that everyone is on the same boat. People may be from diverse backgrounds, age groups, socioeconomic status but they feel the same emotions and the problems they face can be strikingly similar to ours.

9. Going with above point, becoming more and more accepting of people and situations including ourselves and our situation would come easier if one is open to trying new things in life.

10. Developing a sense of humor for real in real time. Rather than being an average morose who needs jokes, other people, media, and all that paraphernalia to get amused, wouldn’t it be good if we could laugh at antics of our own minds? Wouldn’t it be good to see our own drama as drama and watch other people getting stuck in it from time to time and smile internally? It is hard to imagine or do this all the time but in every person’s life there at least has been one such instance of epiphany when randomness of events took the best of them and they simply laughed at how life was just a game. There is nothing serious about it and nobody comes alive out of it.


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