We can't always control what happens in our life,
But we can be mindful of how we respond when circumstances come our way.
You know,
We've all faced struggles in our life,
Whether you've lost a loved one,
Whether your career or a business that you've worked so hard for is falling apart,
If you had issues with your health,
Or even if it's a trauma that you suffered many years ago.
Now in my life,
I found that having the tools to bring me back to peace have been the most helpful in allowing me to heal and take the emotional pain away,
Because the longer that we hold onto the pain,
The more it ends up hurting us.
How many times in life have you heard people say,
Just let go,
Let go of the past,
Let go of the pain.
But how do you do this?
When something difficult happens,
It's so natural for the mind to resist the reality of life.
We start creating a story in our mind that says,
It shouldn't have happened.
Life was not meant to turn out this way.
And when there's something that we're resisting,
We often find ourselves complaining,
Avoiding a situation,
Trying to run away from it,
And just generally protesting against it in some way.
One of the ways in which we can overcome mental anguish and pain is by using the power of acceptance.
A really powerful question that I ask myself whenever I'm feeling down is,
What am I not accepting right now?
What part of reality am I resisting?
You know,
The psychoanalyst Carl Jung said,
What you resist persists.
And so rather than just telling myself,
Let go of a problem,
I remind myself to stop resisting.
And when I do that,
I realize,
Resisting is something that I'm doing,
And not resisting is something that I can also practice and learn to do.
You know,
Sometimes it can feel like the whole universe is against you.
And when I feel like that,
I have to remind myself that the universe isn't against me.
It's normally me that's fighting against the universe.
It's a bit like a fish that you see that's swimming against the current.
It's flowing upstream,
And it's trying so hard to go in the opposite direction.
And life can sometimes feel like that.
But no matter how much we try,
The fish can never change the direction of the stream.
And in the same way,
There are certain people or circumstances that we just simply can't change.
So instead of being like the fish,
Maybe we should be more like the water,
The river that's always flowing down the easiest path that takes the path of least resistance.
And this is what Guru Nanak has called Hukam,
What Lao Tzu refers to as the Tao.
It's the natural force of life,
What I like to think of as the flow of life.
This flow that everyone is within,
No one is above the force of nature.
But our mind just has to learn to live in unison and harmony with the flow of life.
And that means learning to accept that sometimes things will happen that are outside of our control.
And either we resist it or we go with the flow.
And you know,
Guru Nanak says that the most meaningful and fruitful life is one that learns to live in this acceptance,
One of total surrender to the universe.
There's a really useful mantra that I like to live by,
Which is,
I don't mind what happens.
If it comes,
Let it come.
If it goes,
Let it go.
And this is something that can be practiced.
So I'm gonna set you a challenge.
I want you to try for one whole day to live in total acceptance.
That means no resisting whatever is happening in life.
No complaining,
No getting agitated or frustrated when things don't go your way,
But just totally surrendering to the flow of life.
