Be happy with who you are

 

The only thing that will make you happy is being happy with who you are.

Goldie Hawn

My whole life, I have depended on my situation in life to determine whether I was happy or not.

Now I am happy with myself, despite my situation.  For the first time in my life, the important thing is to love myself and make myself happy by just doing nothing in particular.  I'm free with no obligation to anyone except myself. 

I've had a lot of time to contemplate who I am, what I want, etc. etc. etc.  The conclusion I came to is to just be happy and content no matter what . . . be content with what I have been blessed with and be grateful to God for all he has blessed me with.  He knows what I need.

What I need is important . . . not what I want.

I have all that I need and I'm happy.

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The Behavior of Others

“Don’t let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace.”  

Dalai Lama

The opinion of others regarding me personally held me captive most of my life.  It agonized me to point of obsession where I was trying to figure out why the person was behaving in this manner.  It made me so sad.

As I look back at my life, I wonder what possessed me to even care about what others thought of me.  I've dealt with this kind of stuff so much that now I could care less and it has become easy to take these people out of my life.

Now I only want to know why and what their problem is.  What makes them think they can act this way toward another person?  It is total rudeness!

It has never been in my nature to lash out and defend myself, I would just ignore it and wish the behavior would go away.  Now I whisk the behavior out of my life . . . and I still won't confront.  It is a mystery to me that I don't confront.  

They no longer steal my inner peace!

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Let me fall

"Let me fall if I must. 

The one I will become will catch me."

Baal Shem Tov

I love that quote!
Falling down has been a recurring theme on my blog since I have been through it so many times since JR passed away.  In my case, the one I will become is the part of me that picks myself back up after I have fallen down.  It is a rare occasion that I can catch myself before falling down.
I've reached the place where I embrace falling down since there is always a lesson in the experience. 
The experience itself is part of becoming the one I will become because of the lesson.
If I don't allow myself to fall down when life becomes difficult, the opportunity to analyze the situation and reassess my direction would not happen.  Healing would probably never happen.
Let me fall, but learn to analyze and pick myself back up quickly.

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Change a situation or change ourselves?

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, 

we are challenged to change ourselves."

Viktor Frankl

Don't you sometimes wish you had a magic wand to change the situation you find yourself in?  If only . . . it would be a great selling item on eBay for sure!

We moved back home after being away due to Hurricane Irma dropping a tree on our house and drastically changing our lives.  I couldn't believe my eyes when I first walked in to find mud that has been drying for a year everywhere.  Part of the ceiling is missing in the kitchen.  No matter how much trash we pick up, the piles don't seem to get smaller.

The situation is not going to change.  We are going to change the situation by taking one step at a time, one day at a time, one moment at a time.  No matter how long it takes, we must carry on and persist in making our house a home again.  First we had to accept what happened and come up with a plan.

Yes, it is so depressing!  But when I feel myself starting to fall down and want to give up, I pray for strength and perseverance . . . and if I really need it, I rest in stillness to get myself together again.  Then I can pick myself up and carry on.

Things happen in life, but we can't allow those things to destroy us.

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Ownership of Challenges

We retake control of our personal power by becoming courageous enough to articulate, out loud and concisely, the essence of our emotions. Our assuming ownership of the challenges before us in this way empowers us to shift from one emotional state to another.

Source:  Daily Om

What about when you don't understand what you are feeling?  One can be in complete control of assuming ownership of the challenges and feel numb to the whole situation.  It is a one step, one moment at a time kind of thing.

It is not a time to make important decisions, as they may or may not be rational with this state of mind.  You can have control of your personal power and still not understand how to proceed effectively.

What if one emotional state runs into another, making it difficult to take complete control.  Maybe there is just too much going on, as the saying would have it "too much on my plate" making concentration and focus on one thing at a time extremely difficult.

This post has taken me a few days to write since I really wanted to think about this and try to put it into a perspective that makes sense to me.  Seems to me it is a compilation of all the things I've written about in this blog concerning emotions . . . fears, procrastination, feelings of unworthiness, times of weakness, and losing control.

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