Your Choice
Be Miserable, Be Happy. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.
The greatest goal you can set is to make peace with your life, no matter your circumstances. These 8 powerful insights will get you started.
1. Don’t seek happiness. If you seek it, you won’t find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness. Happiness is ever elusive, but freedom from unhappiness is attainable now, by facing what is rather than making up stories about it.
2. The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is. There is the situation or the fact, and here are my thoughts about it. Instead of making up stories, stay with the facts. Facing facts is always empowering.
3. See if you can catch the voice in your head, perhaps in the very moment it complains about something, and recognize it for what it is: the voice of the ego, no more than a thought. Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it. In fact, you are the awareness that is aware of the voice. In the background, there is the awareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, the thinker. In this way you are becoming free of the ego, free of the unobserved mind.
4. Why do anxiety, stress, or negativity arise? Because you turned away from the present moment. And why did you do that? You thought something else was more important. One small error, one misperception, creates a world of suffering.
5. People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens for their happiness. They don’t realize that what happens is the most unstable thing in the universe. It changes constantly.
6. The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise, you will be forced to relive the past again and again.
7. You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you and allowing that goodness to emerge.
8. If peace is really what you want, then you will choose peace.
