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How can we wake up and take full responsibility for our lives? How do we live when we know that outer events do not determine our inner experience? I have been contemplating these questions deeply during the last while. In one of my newsletters lately I wrote about the Dalai Lama as being a living example of someone who has found an unshakeable sense of well being, undiminished by the horror of what has happened to his country.
As I inquired into this over the last few weeks, several changes unfolded in my life that were very challenging for me. I notice this a lot-life itself seems to play with me when I am engaged in this kind of work. It’s as if life is teasing me, saying, “Do you really want to know how to be unconditionally happy? Then try this on for size.”
So I have been dealing with some major obstacles in my life that won’t go away. And noticing that waves of fear and regret just flow through me, without really sticking. I see very clearly that it would make sense to my conditioned mind to get quite unhappy about these things. And that just perpetuates the whole illusion that I can only be happy when things are going ‘my way.’ I don’t want to live like that anymore. It’s just that simple.
I read an article today which spoke about research they have done with people who have won the lottery. The vast majority of them were not one bit more fulfilled a year after winning all that money than they were before. And of a group of people who were paralyzed as a result of accidents or strokes, most of them were not more unhappy than before it happened. I know one of these people. Mary Jo Fetterley, a friend of mine, was paralyzed as a result of a ski accident. To my amazement, she has continued to operate her yoga business full steam ahead, and live life just as fully as she did before the accident.
It’s so easy to imprison ourselves with the fear of the worst that could happen, and lose this moment in dreams of what ‘could be.’
Amazing to actually realize that neither of those two possibilities has any real power over the truth of who we really are, inside.
