Get More of the Wanted and Less of the Unwanted

Life is never going to present us with only things that we want to encounter. There is always going to be a mix of circumstances, desirable and undesirable.

(Image source TinyBuddha.com)

The challenge we face is in learning how to greet even what may appear as unfavorable circumstances with the same peace of mind we greet all moments. Can we have an internal source of our well-being?

No one ever gets that perfectly, of course. But it’s important to clarify what we’re even aiming for. What are we trying to do?

Are we diligently improving our ability to direct our emotions by directing our mental focus, or are we diligently practicing meditating on what we don’t want and cultivating the troubling emotions that go with those thoughts?

Worry is a Meditation

When you worry, or even when you try to figure out how to prevent something unwanted from happening if you don’t call that worrying, you are basically meditating on what you don’t want. You are cultivating the energy of that and making yourself more of a match for it.

Just as meditation practice on calming points of focus like the breath, or the sky, or a mantra, etc. train the mind and emotions for peaceful well-being, meditation practice on the unwanted trains you for agitation and frustration in life.

Whether you believe in ideas like the Law of Attraction or not, surely you can see from your life experience that when you are in a good mood, things tend to go your way more. And when you’re in a bad mood one inconvenience or misfortune after another seems to beset you. Bad things sometimes happen in the midst of a good mental state and vice versa, but there is definitely a trend I see of more good following good and more bad following bad most of the time.

So not only do you immediately feel worse when you focus your mind on all the things you’re trying to prevent, but you’re likely to also create worse outcomes.

What’s worse, the effects of your worrying won’t only afffect the subject you’re worrying about. It will also put you in sync with all sorts of problems developing in other areas of your life as well. You simply tune yourself to that station, then you pick up whatever is broadcasting there, whether you were looking for that or not, and whether you want it or not.

The Power of Focus

Contrast this sorry scenario with the alternative in which you learn to create a mental habit of focusing on what you do want, even if a current situation isn’t what you want.

What if in the midst of lack you could focus on fullness?

What if in the midst of desire you could focus on fulfillment?

What if in the midst of things developing in a way you don’t want, you could focus on what it would be like if they instead took a turn for the better? Could you feel into that? What would that desired outcome feel like?

Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, but is the chance at becoming the director of your own life instead of a victim of circumstances worth your giving it a try?

Take a minute now and think about something going on in your life where you can see it might go a way you want or might go a way you don’t want. Once you have something in mind, imagine it playing out ideally in your favor.

What happens?

How do you feel as it is happening?

What happens as a result of that having played out so favorably?

How do you react to that?

Let yourself enjoy scripting your life the way you want it to be. Trust that if things do go a direction you don’t want, you will be up to responding to that at the time. And you won’t have wasted a minute punishing yourself in advance!

Resteems always appreciated