Why We Don’t Always Get What We Want

By Ernest Dempsey

“Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.” ~Dalai Lama

It’s probably happened to you. In all likelihood, it has happened multiple times in your life thus far.

You don’t understand why it happens. And when it does, it can throw you into the deepest valleys of despair.

Perhaps you cry out to a higher power to make things better. Maybe you just stare into the cosmos, wondering what the meaning of life is and why things get tough.

I’ve been there. Many times. For all sorts of reasons.

Breakups, career problems, dealing with a death, financial issues, there are a million things that can put you into this frame of mind.

You know what you want more than anything, but no matter what you do, the universe just doesn’t seem to give it to you. Why? Why can’t things just be easier, simpler? Why can’t things get better?

Why can’t we get what we want?

A few years ago I was going through an extremely difficult time in my life. My fiancé of four years had broken up with me. Over the phone.

No visit. No long talk about how we could maybe work it out. She just told me she couldn’t do it anymore.

And just like that, I was thrown into that valley.

I spent the next few months searching for answers. I read through different religious texts, self-help sites, and scientific books. I prayed, I meditated, and I even tried to visualize the thing that I wanted the most.  

I just wanted my fiancé back.

My work suffered at my job, though I didn’t notice. It took an old friend, one of my bosses, calling me into his office and having an honest conversation for me to realize that I was basically coasting through the weeks.

In the evenings, I was plagued by dreams of my ex. In them, we were happy and together. Everything had worked out.

Of course, I always woke up in the middle of the night, sweating and crying. Yeah, I woke up crying.

I was raised to believe in a higher power. But during those nights of torture, I found myself pounding my pillow and begging him/her to make everything better.

Nothing ever got better, though.

Talks with friends yielded no good counsel. As a student of the psychological sciences, and a counselor myself, their cliché words only served to frustrate me.

“There’s a reason for everything.” “If it’s meant to be.” “Time heals all wounds.” The more I heard their fortune cookie advice, the angrier I became.  

And the whole time, I continued to beg the higher power to fix everything.

One day at my job, I was talking to one of the teachers I worked with. She was a huge fan of Native American history and had an interesting perspective on my predicament.

She suggested that I go on a vision quest.

I’d done one of these when I was in graduate school as part of an assignment. We had studied the ancient technique the natives used when they were searching for answers, so I was pretty familiar with the process.

If you don’t know what a vision quest is, you go out to a place where all you can do is observe the world around you and focus intensely on the thoughts that come as a result.

This time, though, the stakes were much higher than on my previous quest.

I decided to do it on a weekend and woke up the following Saturday morning with one mission in mind: to find answers. 

The former capital of the Cherokee nation was only twenty minutes from my house, now set aside as a state park. I figured what better place to do a vision quest than where the Native Americans used to live?

It was a chilly morning, and the forests surrounding the historical site were thick with fog as I began my walk.

I stopped at various points along the way to meditate and pray. There was one spot next to a gentle brook where I watched the birds and squirrels scurrying about their day, mirroring the many thoughts and feelings rushing around in my head.

While nature was peaceful around me, a storm still raged in my heart centering around a single question: Why can’t I have what I want?

I continued the walk, writing down every thought and emotion that came to my mind. Minutes turned into hours and, as I neared the fourth hour of my quest, I decided it was getting close to time for me to leave. Empty handed.

I neared the top of a ridge at the edge of the sacred land and looked up into the leafy canopy of the forest. Poplar, oak, and maple leaves hung silently above me.

“I just want to know why you won’t fix this for me,” I said out loud, bitterly.

Suddenly, my mind was whisked back to the school where I work to a point a few weeks before and a conversation I’d had with one of my students. I’d walked into the computer classroom to see what everyone was working on that day and he’d gotten my attention.

“Hey, can you fix my grade in this class so I can pass?”

The question caught me off guard and I laughed. “Yeah, I can do that,” I surprised him with my answer. As a school counselor, I have access to that kind of stuff.

His face became hopeful. “You can?”

I went on to explain to him that I could do that, but I wouldn’t.

He asked why.

I told him it was because if I fixed everything for him like that, he would never learn anything.

My brain zipped back to the moment, standing on the forest trail. The realization punched me in the face like Mike Tyson in his prime.

A smile crept onto my face. Then I began to laugh and looked back up into the treetops.  A robust breeze rolled in, waving the high branches around dramatically.

I continued to smile as I spun around staring dizzily into the rustling leaves.

That was it. If someone or something always fixed everything for me all the time, I would never learn anything. More than that, I would never be able to do anything for myself in life. I would always be dependent on someone or something else to make things better for me. 

I would never be able to learn another language, live in a foreign environment, try new foods or activities, or grow as a person in any way.

Sometimes in life things happen that can be difficult, and often they can be extremely painful. We must push through those moments where all seems lost. When we do, we can find a new us on the other side that is wiser and more beautiful than we ever imagined.

By working through these difficult changes in life, we grow into something new, better, stronger.

To paraphrase what the Rolling Stones said: You can’t always get what you want. But you get what you need.

let’s talk about courage

Share a part of the book highlights here– letting go written by Dr. David Hawkins. 

The hallmark of courage is the knowledge and feeling, “I can.” It is a positive state in which we feel assured, skillful, adequate, capable, alive, loving and giving, with an overall zest for life.

The Courage to Let Go

The level of courage is very helpful in the mechanism of surrender. In courage, we know: “I can look at my feelings”; “I don’t have to be afraid of my feelings anymore”; “I can handle them”; “I can take responsibility for them”; “I can learn how to accept them and be free from them”; “I am willing to take risks, to let go of old points of view and to explore new ones”; “I am willing to be joyous and share my experience with others”; “I experience myself as willing and able.” It is often easy to jump from any of the lower feelings up to courage merely by affirming our courage to look at and handle our feelings. 

We all know that it takes courage to face fear. We champion the people who face their fear and attempt to do something about it. Such courage is one of the characteristics of nobility and makes a person truly great. Despite all of their negative programming and despite all of their fear, courageous people go forward in life, with no guarantee and not even the knowledge that things are going to get better. 

On the level of courage, the emphasis is on doing. The levels of consciousness up to this point are concerned primarily with gain. Now, on the level of courage, there is greater power and energy. We know that we have the capacity to make a difference in the world, not just gain something from it for ourselves. Because of the inner self-confidence, we are much less concerned with security. The emphasis is no longer on what people have, but upon what they do, and have become.

With courage, there is the willingness to take chances and to let go of former securities. There is the willingness to grow and benefit from new experiences.

When we are comfortable, there is a temptation to stop using the technique and only resume it in emergency situations, or when negative feelings again become painful and necessitate our attention. However, there is more yet to be had. Because there is always a feeling going on which can be surrendered, the continuation of the process will lead to greater and greater benefits. Continual surrender will bring about constant, subtle changes, especially on the levels of subtle awareness in our capacity for love.

Don’t look for answers; instead, let go of the feelings behind the question. When we are surrendered on the feeling behind the question, we can let go of any other feelings that we might also have about what seems to be the problem.

The goal of letting go is the elimination of the very source of all suffering and pain. This sounds radical and startling and, in fact, it is! Ultimately, all negative feelings stem from the same source. When enough negative feelings have been relinquished, that source reveals itself. When that source itself is let go of and dis-identified with, the ego dissolves. The source of suffering, therefore, loses the very basis of its power.

When we surrender the pressure of wantingness, we are clear to make wiser choices and decisions.

We think that our happiness depends on controlling events, and that facts are what upset us. Actually, it is our feelings and thoughts about these facts that are the real cause of our upset. Facts in and of themselves are neutral things. The power we give them is due to our attitude of acceptance or non-acceptance and our overall feeling state. If we get stuck in a feeling, it is because we still secretly believe that it will accomplish something for us.

A Guide to Peace for Anyone with a Crazy, Messed Up Mind

By Richard Paterson

“No thought has any power. You have power. And when you identify and believe in the thought, you give power to the thought.” ~Mooji

It was 2004. I was on day three of a six-month meditation retreat, and my restless and turbulent mind was driving me nuts.

The prospect of sitting on this wretched cushion for another five minutes (let alone six months) was freaking me out.

“What on earth have I let myself in for? This is a crazy idea. I want to go home.”

My restless monkey mind was more like King Kong on amphetamines.

“No, remember how messed up you were before you arrived—and the crazy synchronicity that led you here,” a second, conciliatory voice chipped in.

Destiny had indeed dragged my ass across the world onto this bright red meditation cushion in mysterious ways.

Long story short, my housemate Jack had come to this meditation center after spraining his wrist and having to pull out of a yoga retreat he was supposed to attend in the US.

A few days later, he called me to say he loved it there and believed he’d found his teacher. He was really excited.

At the time, I was going through a particularly difficult period in my life. I had hit a brick wall and had no idea where to turn. So you can imagine my delight when I received a message from Jack, saying, “You’ll never guess what happened. I was talking to my teacher about you and he said, ‘Tell him to come to Canada as soon as he can and not to worry about the money. Just come.’”

Ten days later, I found myself perched on a bright red meditation cushion on a stunning property in the Canadian Rockies.

And this is where the real story begins.

As I sat on my cushion on day three, my restless mind was spinning out on overdrive. I needed help.

Unable to sit any longer, I stood up and approached the head monk:

“I’m really struggling here. I need to talk,” I said.

The conversation that ensued remains etched in my mind to this day. It went something like this:

“What’s the problem?” he asked with a look of compassion.

“I can’t stop thinking,” I replied.

“No, you can’t,” he smiled.

I was taken aback. It wasn’t the answer I was expecting.

“Nobody can. If you didn’t have a crazy, messed up mind, you wouldn’t be human.”

“But I’m going nuts. My mind is driving me crazy,” I pleaded.

“What the mind gets up to needn’t be any of your business,” he continued. “You are suffering because you’re open for business. You need to shut up shop. Just relax, be alert, and focus on your breath. Let the thoughts come and go without resistance. Leave the mind in peace to do its thing and it will leave you in peace to do yours. The mind can only trouble you if you entertain it.”

If You Didn’t Have A Crazy, Messed Up Mind, You Wouldn’t Be Human

Boy, that’s quite a statement!

We tend to see ourselves as special cases.

Nobody is quite as screwed up as I am, right?

If people only knew the nonsense that goes on inside my head, I’d have no friends at all, right?

Over the following six-month period, many of my long-held beliefs about the nature of the mind and the causes of suffering crumbled away.

When I showed up in Canada, I was riddled with self-judgment. I believed that finding peace (if it was even possible, which I doubted) would be a monumental task, requiring a complete overhaul of my broken mind.

Here are some of the key points I came to understand:

• Being messed up is an inevitable and unavoidable part of being human. Don’t beat yourself up over it.
• Peace of mind is an illusion because restlessness is the nature of mind. Disturbance and mind are one and the same thing.
• You don’t need to change or fix your thoughts in order to experience peace. You need to recognize the mind for what it is.
• There is no distance between you and peace. It is available to each of us in every moment… no matter what is going on in the mind.

Over time, I began to grasp and apply what my teacher meant by shutting up shop and minding your own business.

I learned that the key to experiencing ongoing contentment is to leave the mind in peace to do it’s crazy, messed up dance—in other words, to mind your own business.

“Allow thoughts to arise but don’t give them a place to land.” ~Papaji

Peace is the natural consequence of not minding what the mind gets up to.

Fast forward six months and I was a person transformed.

I was now finding my time on the cushion enjoyable and hugely rewarding. I was quite prone to experiencing blissful episodes… even with a chaotic mind. I had never known peace like this before.

I had also, much to my own surprise, taken my novice vows as a monk and received a new name. I wondered how that was going to go down with my family at home!

The following are seven key lessons I learned for dealing with an unruly mind to experience ongoing peace.

1. See the thoughts, don’t be the thoughts.

The first and most important step toward reclaiming your peace is to create some blue sky between you and the mind—to see your thoughts as objects rather than being enmeshed in them.

See the thoughts, don’t be the thoughts.

Thoughts are like clouds floating across the vast sky.

White clouds come and go. Black clouds come and go. They are temporary and don’t affect the sky in any way. Every cloud is welcome. The sky has no preferences and remains untouched.

And it’s the same with the mind.

Thoughts constantly change but your awareness is like the sky— vast and unchanging.

Learning to step back and observe the passing thoughts with an attitude of dispassion and non-judgmental acceptance is the key to experiencing peace.

The thoughts are not the problem. The real issue is your identification with them. Recognizing this can transform your life in an instant.

2. Know there is nothing wrong with you.

This was a big one for me.

An ‘unholy’ thought appears in your head—a judgmental thought, a resentful thought, or a jealous thought—and you beat yourself up for having it.

You believe that you shouldn’t be having thoughts like these—that there is something wrong with you.

Well, there is nothing wrong. Everybody, without exception, has these kinds of thoughts. It’s called being human.

The mind is part of the human apparatus, just like arms or eyes.

It is very much like a computer. Your cultural conditioning, your DNA, and your unique set of life experiences determine the thoughts it churns out.

Given your background and history, your mind could not be producing thoughts other than the ones it’s producing.

Your thoughts are not personal. They are part of your programming, part of the human condition.

3. Roll out the red carpet.

When thoughts you label “good” enter your awareness, they meet with no resistance. You are quite happy for them to hang around.

When you label a thought as “bad” or “undesirable,” you reject it. It’s unwelcome.

It is this tendency to judge unwanted thoughts as bad or wrong that creates suffering.

Thoughts are not inherently good or bad. You make them so through your labeling. They are neutral events passing through your awareness and, left alone, have no power to make you suffer.

Let them come and go. Remain as the observer. Don’t give them a place to land.

Roll out the red carpet for all thoughts—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Treat all thoughts as honored guests and watch your peace and happiness blossom.

4. The mind is a bigger liar than Pinocchio.

“I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional.” ~Byron Katie

Take everything the mind tells you with a large pinch of salt.

Question, in particular, your beliefs and assumptions.

Every day, we unconsciously make so many assumptions.

If you dislike your job, for example, you probably make the assumption, before you even leave the house in the morning, that your day won’t be enjoyable.

Be innocent. Be prepared for surprises.

Ask yourself the question: “Do I know for certain that this belief, this assumption, is true?”

Can you find evidence to support the opposite?

You may well find that it is surprisingly easy to disprove some of your long-held beliefs.

5. Don’t allow thoughts to turn into thinking.

Thoughts are self-arising. They appear by themselves from nowhere. There is nothing you can do to stop them from appearing. It is simply the mind doing what it does.

Thinking, on the other hand, is a choice.

A thought such as: “She hasn’t called for two hours” triggers a stream of thoughts:

“Did I say something wrong? Maybe she’s having second thoughts? She probably finds me unattractive. She looks like she works out a lot. Maybe she thinks I’m not good enough for her.”

This is thinking (and it is also based on unfound beliefs).

The original thought arrived by itself. You didn’t choose it. The resulting stream of thoughts, on the other hand, is something you can choose to indulge in or not.

Thinking is a choice. The more you become aware of your tendency to do this, the easier it becomes to stop yourself mid- sentence.

Most of our thinking is unconscious. We create so much unnecessary suffering for ourselves through a simple lack of awareness.

6. Know you are not your thoughts.

Think of it logically. 
Anything you can objectify cannot be who you are.

I (the subject) am aware of the book (the object) lying on the table. Therefore, I can’t be the book.

You can apply the exact same logic to thoughts, feelings, emotions, or the mind. Anything I can observe, I can’t be.

Anything I call “my”—my thoughts, my feelings, my emotions—cannot be me.

When you believe you are your thoughts, it is natural that you will judge them as “bad” or “wrong” and judge yourself for having them.

Another metaphor used in meditation is the analogy of the screen and the movie. If there is a fire in the movie, the screen doesn’t get burned.

The awareness that you are remains untouched by anything you are aware of. Your thoughts are not you. They are events passing across the screen of your awareness. Who you are doesn’t change.

The awareness that you are doesn’t know happiness or unhappiness. It is only aware. It is always at peace.

7. Withdraw your attention from the mind.

When I first ‘got’ these simple truths, I had a massive Homer Simpson “DUH” moment.

Why doesn’t everyone see this? It’s so obvious.

And yet, without having had it pointed out to me, I would never have seen that engaging with the mind is optional, not obligatory.

Having better understood the nature of the mind and the difference between thoughts and thinking, I now give it far less importance than I used to.

I am much happier as a result, regardless of what kind of thoughts appear.

Fear thoughts, doubt thoughts, and anger thoughts continue to arise as before. Now I know it’s simply the conditioned mind doing its thing. There is nothing wrong with any of it. I only suffer when I unconsciously resist or judge.

Happiness is not about the absence of unhappy thoughts, feelings, and emotions. It comes from understanding that I am not defined by any of these. They are free to come and go as they please.

The mind has as much or as little power over you as you give it.

The mind is not your enemy. It is your most valuable ally—an incredible servant that is always there for you to use as you choose.

“Mind: a beautiful servant or a dangerous master.” ~Osho

Option B – breathing again❤️

This month, I started with the new book Option B, written by Sheryl Sandberg, a very warm and touching book. Some sharing is as follows.

1. Martin Seligman, three P’s can stunt recovery:

1) personalisation– the belief that we are at fault;

2) pervasiveness– the belief that an event will affect all areas of our life;

3) permanence– the belief that the aftershocks of the event will last forever.

This is black or white problem, either awesome or awful!

But it’s not TURE!

The hardships aren’t entirely your fault, don’t affect every aspect of their lives, and won’t follow them everywhere forever.

Banish “sorry” from your vocabulary, and try to eliminate “never” or “always” and replace them with the “sometimes” or “lately”.

2. All life involves suffering. Aging, sickness and loss are inevitable. 

Making friends with our own demons. I wasn’t going out for a drink with my demons, but as I accepted them, they did haunt me less.

Respect our feeling,

Heartache was not going to last forever.

We all have to deal with loss, jobs lost, loves lost and lives lost.

The questions is not whether these things will happen. They will, and we will have to face them.

To be continued.

How to Be Less Anxious About Things You Can’t Change

By Benjamin Fishel

“One of the happiest moments is when you find the courage to let go of what you can’t change.” ~Unknown

Over the last few years, I’ve had to deal with a frustrating problem.

It’s something that’s not uncommon, but it can be debilitating, and it has affected me every day. Some days have been incredibly tough, and they’ve tested my tolerance and my patience.

The problem is chronic back pain.

Every day I get up, knowing that throughout the day I’m going to have a discomfort that could oscillate between a mild annoyance and an intense burning. At some point, it’s going to distract me. Either while I work, while I eat, while I meditate, while I exercise, and sometimes while I sleep.

You’d think by now I would’ve gotten used to it, that it would’ve become the unwelcomed friend that I’d learned to live with. Unfortunately, that’s only the case sometimes.

But I am (slowly but surely) learning firsthand the value of something incredibly profound that the meditation teacher Shinzen Young once said:

“Suffering = Pain x Resistance.”

When it comes to the suffering we experience when dealing with physical pain, it’s not always easy to know exactly what is pain and what is resistance to that pain.

In my own situation, every now and then, when the pain is very uncomfortable, I’ll start to ruminate. My mind will begin to make up stories about how severe the pain is, how much worse it’s going to get, what I could’ve done to prevent it, and anything else to resist the experience.

But there are certain things you can’t know and certain things you can’t change. I’m doing the best I can to try and prevent the pain—I’ve seen a number of specialists, all with varying opinions.

My focus now is, how can I reduce the resistance and alleviate the suffering?

This is broadly related to another important existential issue and something that I want to explore with you in a little bit of detail.

We all have to deal with situations that we have no control over; illness, death, and loss are inevitable. I’m going to share with you how I’ve faced this, in the context of my back pain, but it’s highly likely that you’re going through something comparable in your life right now. It might be something less obvious, like a part of your job that you’re not entirely comfortable with, or it may be a lot more serious, like the terminal illness of someone you love.

Either way, we’re facing the same question: How can I be less anxious about the things I can’t change?

Here are four things I’ve done to manage this anxiety.

1. Keep track of the stories my mind is telling me about any situation.

One thing that you realize by paying attention to your pain is that the mind is a master storyteller. The natural response to any uncomfortable situation is to create a mental novella equipped with a list of assumptions, a worldview, and a timeline about the past and future.

Your job, however, is to tease out fact from fiction. If I have pain when I’m working, my mind might start to tell me the story of how I’m going to be late to the project I’m working on, or that I’ll never figure out how to overcome the pain, or any number of things that one, aren’t either true or knowable and two, aren’t the least bit relevant to the situation at hand.

If you write down a list of the ideas you have about the thing you can’t change, you’ll start to see recurring themes and you can see the movie that’s playing in your mind without getting absorbed in it.

2. Meditate on the pain and resistance and figure out which is which.

Remember the Shinzen Young quote I shared earlier: “Suffering = Pain x Resistance.” Well, understanding when resistance to the situation is making up the bulk of your suffering is an incredibly useful skill to learn.

You can do this in meditation by inquiring into your thoughts and feelings. I may ask myself “If I could accept this pain completely, just for a few moments, what would the pain feel like?”

If the pain decreases significantly, it’s clear that the experience was dominated by resistance. If, however, there is little change, then it’s the physical pain itself that is the problem. More often than not I’ve found that resistance is worse than the pain itself!

3. Highlight the positive aspects of the thing I can’t change.

This is pretty much good old-fashioned re-framing. Focus your attention on what’s positive about the thing you can’t change, and very importantly, celebrate the little wins.

For example, I try to tell myself, “My back hurts today, but at least it’s not stopping me from going to the gym.” And if I have a day where the pain is less serious than other days, I’ll make a mental note of it, and try to express it in some form, i.e.: “My day was good. I got a lot of work down and it was relatively pain-free.”

4. Practice the art of letting go.

This practice is something that comes hand in hand with noticing resistance. We don’t often think of letting go as a skill, but it is. In the same way we can become adept at holding onto something, we can learn how to do the opposite.

There are two aspects of letting go that you can practice. Firstly, the depth of letting go; that is, how completely can you consciously let go of something that is bothering you.

If I have a pain in my back and I exhale deeply, telling myself it’s okay, but five seconds later I’m thinking about how frustrated I am about the pain—well, I have a lot of practice to do.

The second aspect is how appropriately you can do so in the moment, i.e.: how good your timing is.

For example, if you spend all day worrying, but then you get home and right before falling asleep you let go, then your timing needs some work. If, however, you catch your mind telling you a story in the moment, and you can objectively see that it’s just a story, you’re on the right track! Meditation is one way to help you see things as they come up in real time.

Learning to become less anxious about things you can’t change is an incredibly valuable life-long skill. It’s unfortunate that typically we have to come to learn this through real challenges and discomfort, but making the best of tough times is one of the beautiful things about being a human being!

When have you learned to be less anxious about things you can’t control? Let us know in the comments; we’d love to hear from you!

What It Means to Live Life with Open Palms and How This Sets Us Free

By Benjamin Fishel

“Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything—anger, anxiety, or possessions—we cannot be free.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

Roughly one year ago, I was having the time of my life.

Everything seemed to be going well. My stress levels were at an all-time low. I was enjoying myself in a new city. Work was engaging. My meditations were deep and fulfilling.

And when I looked back on things one year later, I was kind of, well, frustrated.

Because things haven’t been going that smoothly lately. Don’t get me wrong; they haven’t been terrible. I’m in a loving relationship, and I’ve achieved a couple of significant milestones this year, but some aspects of life have been challenging.

A couple of months ago I was talking to a meditation teacher who I occasionally consult when I’m having issues with my practice. I was honest about my situation, and my frustration with it.

So I asked her what I was genuinely thinking; why doesn’t it feel like things are as good as they were twelve months ago?

And what she told me stunned me. I mean, it really left me thinking.

“You need to start living life with open palms. You tried to grasp onto the good times you had, and the experience has gone. But any challenges you have now will also go, you just need to hold onto them softly, with open palms.”

The metaphor was so poignant. It made complete sense. I could feel myself grasping onto the idea of the old scenario and making dozens of assumptions about the new one.

And those words stuck with me. They truly resonated. In fact, echoed might be a better description, because since then, whenever I’ve started to stress and hold onto my problems too tightly, the image of two open palms would arise and drift around the back of my mind, calling me to pay attention to it.

There’s a reason why this metaphor is so accurate—the left cerebral hemisphere, which we use for focused attention, is also responsible for the grabbing motion our hand makes. The right hemisphere on the other hand (pun absolutely intended) is used for both open-minded thinking and open exploratory motions. So when someone tells you to hold on or to let go, they’re telling you what to do with your mind, not just your hands.

So over the last few weeks, I’ve tried to reflect on what this means from a practical perspective, and while teachings like this take years to really digest, I’ve come up with a few ways in which you can start to live life with open palms, right now.

Appreciate things momentarily.

At first, I didn’t really understand why this was important. To only appreciate things for a split second seemed to be to under-appreciate or even neglect them. But I soon realized that when I was trying too hard to enjoy something, I ended up quickly telling myself a story about how good it was—and soon enough I wasn’t actually experiencing the object anymore, I was enjoying the idea of it.

By making a conscious attempt to appreciate things momentarily, I’ve been able to achieve two things. Firstly, I get used to short-term experiences so when pleasure leaves, it’s okay because I know something else will come soon. And secondly, I’m able to focus on the direct experience and not get lost in my judgments about it.

Remind myself about the transience of things.

This is relevant to letting the momentary experiences go.

Whenever I see a pleasure arise, whether it’s a nicely cooked meal, a Netflix show, a hot shower, or just sitting down after a long day, I try to remind myself that it will soon pass and something else will replace is.

When I’m experiencing less pleasurable states, like physical discomfort, boredom, tiredness, or even pain, I similarly try to watch it come and watch it go, not getting too attached either way.

Identify with my experience over my narrative.

Though relatively simple, this idea is incredibly profound.

My worry over whether or not I was better off than twelve months prior was largely rooted in the story I was telling myself. The story, once I had told it enough times, quickly became my experience.

If however, I had just been focusing on the sensations I was having in each moment, there would have been no ruminating on the past, and a lot of the problems I was creating for myself simply would’ve ceased to exist.

Don’t shy away from pleasure.

One of the ways we protect ourselves from subtle feelings such as a fear of loss or feelings of not being worthy is by not allowing ourselves to fully appreciate positive experiences when we have them. It takes a certain kind of vulnerability to give ourselves over to pleasure, and oftentimes there is an unconscious shield between us and our experience that may manifest itself in slight muscular tension or distracting thoughts.

I’ve made a conscious effort to focus on getting the most out of joyful moments when they come up and not holding back from completely enjoying them.

Question my relationship to time.

A lot of the suffering that comes from our experience arises because we can’t help but compare it to another moment in time. In my own case, it was because I was arbitrarily using the marker of a year to make judgments about how I should’ve been feeling.

I felt that this year should be as good as or better than last year. Not only is it pointless to make the comparison, but it’s impossible to do so accurately. When we’re told to be present and not focus too heavily on the past or the future, it’s not only practical advice, it’s rational advice; our ideas about time are incredibly skewed and often dictated in large part by our emotional state in that moment.

The ways by which I’ve been trying to live life with open palms are nothing groundbreaking. They’re tried and tested ideas that most of us have already had some exposure to. What is difficult, however, is our ability to remember these in any given moment, when they should be most useful.

We can do this by anchoring ourselves to the ideas, whether through a mantra, a memorable metaphor, or simply just repeated exposure, as you’re doing right now reading this article.

How have you tried to live life with open palms? Let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

How We Suffer When We Judge Other People’s Choices

By Rachel Archelaus

“The greatest gift you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance.” ~Brian Tracy

Two months ago I travelled back home to Connecticut to care for a sick parent. My dad was preparing for cancer treatment, trying to figure out the medical system, and packing up to move all at the same time. He was overwhelmed with stress and exhausted from his pain medication. As a caring and health-conscious daughter, I was eager to help.

I had visions of cooking him meals of steamed greens and healthy soups. And I stocked my suitcase with supplements that would ease the pain and help his body detoxify. Growing up, I suffered from an autoimmune disorder called Celiac disease, which made any food with gluten in it toxic to me, so I deeply understood the link between what we consume and how the body functions.

It excited me to be able to pass this knowledge on to my dad. We always had a close bond, and in times of illness it’s easy to feel helpless. I figured this could be my contribution.

I was afraid to see my dad ill. I’d been living in Arizona for the past two years so I didn’t have to see the change in his appearance. The butterflies in my stomach expanded as I drove to his house the first time. Thinking of him being unable to move freely, work, and have a regular life tore me up inside.

My plan was to visit him every day for three weeks and to do whatever I could to help. Luckily, seeing him in person lifted some of my worry. He seemed motivated to try new things, like trade in his meat for vegetables. And he even listened intently while I showed him what supplements to take and when.

That set up didn’t last, though. As the days went on I noticed that the bottles of pills and their color-coded instructions didn’t move. I saw that the dirty pans in the kitchen were covered in grease. Once again, my stomach was in knots and I felt panicked. 

The heaviness I felt about my dad’s illness subsided when I thought he was on board with my amateur health plan. And I was only suggesting what seemed like common sense. When he didn’t wholeheartedly take my advice, a feeling of grief took me over. I felt like he wasn’t taking care of himself and that I had wasted my time in coming to see him.

It felt like he was rejecting me.

One night about a week into my trip I spoke with my boyfriend on the phone. He was upset about a plumbing issue at the house and that our cat might be sick. Tears started streaming down my face involuntarily.

“It’s not so easy here, either,” I said with a wilt in my voice. It seemed that the stress my dad felt about his condition melted into me. And the fact that my plan to save him wasn’t working made me feel overextended.

And then it hit me: I was suffering because I judged the situation. 

In my mind he wasn’t doing what he could to get better, and that was wrong. And by assigning that judgment, I suffered. As soon as I accepted that he could navigate this journey in any way he wished and that was okay, my internal pain disappeared. It was like magic.

Suddenly I felt my boundaries coming back. It was easier to go to visit him when I felt like it instead of being motivated by fear and obligation. I found a way to precook some meals for him that he could add into his meat dishes. I worked with and respected his choices.

He appreciated my new attitude. I wasn’t another person telling him what to do. What he really wanted was someone to listen, and I was now capable of doing that. 

This made me more of a comfort and support to him and it gave me back the ability to actually enjoy myself. Before this epiphany I was choosing to stay in, feeling depressed instead of visiting with friends I hadn’t seen in months. Releasing judgment on my father’s situation gave me a multidimensional gift.

When I thought back to other times when I’ve suffered, I saw that the pattern held up. Addiction is a great example of this.

I’ve had a few close friends and family members battle drug and alcohol demons, and the feeling in my belly was the same. I felt heavy and sick when I thought about the choices those people were making and how hard their lives must be. But it wasn’t them giving me the feeling; it was my own judgment of their situation.

I was making their life path wrong.

There are plenty of things in my past that could have garnered the same judgment. I used to smoke cigarettes, I dropped out of high school and took my GED instead of graduating, I got married young and then got divorced. My life wasn’t picture perfect, but I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything. They taught me valuable lessons, and without them, I wouldn’t be me.

The suffering I felt was my creation. It was a choice. And just as easily as the heavy feeling came on, it left as I reminded myself of that. I realized that true compassion can be felt without taking on any negative feeling. Compassion is love and acceptance of where a person is; it should feel good.

Do you have friends and family members that you feel are making the wrong choices? It’s an easy trap to get into when gossip magazines and shows feel like the cornerstone of our culture. Everyone is supposed to have an opinion on the lives of others. So don’t feel badly if you have taken on that task. 

The next time you feel yourself sinking because of another person’s decisions, remember to pause. Ask yourself if you are taking on this feeling of heaviness because you are judging them. If the answer is yes, then see if you can let it go. You can turn your concern into acceptance and still serve your loved one in the way they most need.

There may be times when you recognize that someone is inflicting harm on themselves or others, and in this case you need to use your best judgment. Get a professional opinion or call the authorities when the moment warrants it. Trying to help in the best way you know how is also a way to ease suffering. Acting on your observation doesn’t make you the bad guy; it frees you of holding accountability for what’s happening.

Coming out of judgment allows you to communicate without attacking. You can hold your own boundaries better and decide from an unemotional place if there needs to be any further intervention. And don’t forget to share with your loved one that you care about them. Hearing that someone loves you is often the best medicine.