Life is supposed to be fun! When you’re having fun, you feel great and you receive great things! When you take life too seriously, you receive serious things. Having fun brings the life you want, and taking things too seriously brings a life you have to take seriously. You have the power over your life, and you can use it to design your life in whatever way you want, but for your own sake, lighten up!
To lighten up about bad feelings, I have imagined bad feelings as wild horses. There’s an angry horse, a resentful horse, blaming horse, sulky horse, cranky horse, grumpy horse, an irritable horse – you name it, there’s a stable full of bad feeling horses. If I feel some disappointment over something that has happened, then I say to myself, “Why did you climb on the disappointment horse? Get off it now, because it’s heading for
more
disappointment and you don’t want to go where it’s going.” And so I imagine bad feelings as wild horses I climb on, and if I climbed on them, then I can get off them too. I don’t see bad feelings as something that is the real me or anyone else, because that is not the truth. Bad feelings are not who you are, and they are not who anyone is. A bad feeling is something you allowed yourself to feel, and you can choose to get off that horse as fast as you jumped on to it.
If you think of bad feelings as a wild horse that you climbed on, it’s one way to take the power out of bad feelings! If someone close to you is cranky, their bad feeling will have far less power to affect you if you imagine them as having climbed on a cranky horse. You will not take their crankiness so personally. But if you do take it personally and you become cranky from their crankiness, then
you
just jumped on the cranky horse with them!
“Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment.”
Lao Tzu
(circa 6th century BC)
FOUNDER OF TAOISM
And so with anything in life that I don’t want, I use my imagination to have fun and take the power out of what I don’t want. Sometimes watching myself or other people ride wild horses in various life situations makes me laugh, and when you can laugh yourself out of a bad feeling, that is really something! You have just changed your life.
So if you are feeling bad, don’t give that bad feeling more power by beating up on yourself that you feel bad. If you do that, you’re just whipping the wild horse into a bigger negative frenzy. The idea is not to hate bad feelings but to deliberately choose good feelings, and choose them more often. When you resist bad feelings, they increase! The more you don’t want bad feelings, the more you increase them. The more you resist anything in life, the more you bring it to you. So don’t care about bad feelings if they come upon you. Don’t resist them at all, and then you take all the power out of them.
POINTS OF POWER
“Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice.”
William Jennings Bryan
(1860-1925)
UNITED STATES POLITICAL LEADER
Life
follows
you. Absolutely everything you experience in your life is a result of what you have given out in your thoughts and feelings, whether you realize you have given them or not. Life is not happening
to
you … life is
following
you. Your destiny is in your hands. Whatever you think, whatever you feel, will decide your life.
Everything in life is presented to you for you to choose what
you
love! Life is a catalogue, and you are the one who chooses what you love from the catalogue! But are you choosing the things you love or are you too busy judging and labeling the bad things? If your life is far from wonderful, then you’ve inadvertently been labeling all the bad things. You’ve allowed the things you think are bad to distract you from the purpose of your life. Because the purpose of your life is to love! The purpose of your life is joy. The purpose of your life is to choose the things you love and turn away from the things you don’t love so you don’t choose them.
Choose What You Love
When you see your dream car go whizzing down the street, life is presenting that car to you! How you feel when you see your dream car is everything, because if you choose to feel nothing but love for that car, you are bringing your dream car to you. But if you feel envy or jealousy because someone else is driving your dream car, you just gonged yourself out of having your dream car. Life presented the car to you so you could choose. And you choose it, by feeling love. Do you see that it doesn’t matter whether someone else has something and you don’t? Life is presenting everything to you, and if you feel love for it, you are bringing the same thing to you.