#30, Freedom, 40 Days of Self Appreciation

Freedom is going to your happy place and choosing to stay there despite what happens to you.

We believe we have a degree of free will and autonomy over our life decisions, but when faced with challenging circumstances, are we in control of our thoughts and feelings?

Don’t let your emotional state be at the mercy of life’s events. You might be happy when things appear to be going well, but are you not still happy when adversity strikes and things don’t go your way? Are your emotional highs met equally with crushing lows? Do you suffer from wide swings in your emotional state? What if there was a way to achieve a stability in your life that was able to persist through even the darkest and most uncertain times? There is a tradeoff to achieving this sort of stable internal state. If you can remain strong during adversity, you must also learn to resist manic states of excitement and reel in your emotions during times of success. It is good to be excited and motivated, but not if you are similarly disappointed and saddened when life throws a wrench in your plans. Your inner state would be forever tied to life’s circumstances. You are on an emotional roller coaster, and because life is a series of unpredictable ups and downs, you are never fully in control. To gain control is to detach your emotions from the events of life. This is the way of Zen. Such inner peace, calm, and strength you would attain by separating the emotions from the inevitable turbulence of the world. You then have a sense of clarity in order to move forward. You are immune from the lows, but also not lured by the highs. In order to be immune from the pain of disappointment, you must also give up the mania of intense desire. That is the tradeoff. Emotional stability is the choice you make to be in control of your inner state so that you can react to life with a clear head. On an emotional scale of 1 to 10, we should aim to sit right around 7. Not so low to become depressed, but also not so high that we risk falling down. This is not to say there will be no lows and no highs in our life. The goal is merely to decrease the volatility in our emotions, to remove the large mood swings, and achieve a degree of stability no matter the outcomes we experience. I hope this helps.