Today I woke up and meditated for 30 minutes. After reading the paper and watching a little TV, I decided to turn off my television and took a beautiful nap. I woke up feeling grateful, which is a feeling I aspire to. Gratitude, love and forgiveness are sort of easy to articulate, but do we really feel it? I have read that we should think of three things to be grateful for before we go to bed. I tried this technique and it did not really work for me. Lately, I started putting post it notes in my room which have encouraging phrases on them, one of which is the word gratitude. I wrote the word about 10 million times on one post it note. One other thing I have been doing is being cleaner in my living space. This seems to have given me a better appreciation of my somewhat small bedroom. Two days ago I went to see my Father and Grandparents grave site. When I was there I thanked my father for doing his part in giving me life. He survived the Holocaust and fled Hungary during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He risked his life fleeing. I am working on having more gratitude. A lot of the work involves working through all our anger, pain and issues. Forgiveness is another concept I am working on. I have read a lot of literature that talks about forgiveness. Well, it is hard to forgive at times. The other night I woke at like 2am and felt very peaceful. I started to think about forgiving some people and it seemed to work. Very often the healing we have to do is not for the current pain, but to some of the deeper trauma we have experienced as far back as childhood. The happier I become, I have not always forgiven certain people but I more easily forget painful incidents.
There are so many things that make up the rubic cube of happiness. Discipline is a big part of the equation. For the past year of two I have been focusing on not gossiping. While gossip may not seem like a big deal, it really is. When we gossip about someone what we are really saying is I can not process this situation. Gossip really is toxic, it cracks foundations in family relationships. Maybe instead of national donut day we could have national no gossip day!!! Another big part of being disciplined is being a good listener. We need to be a listener of other people which takes years to learn and a listener to our inner dialogue.
When I say a good listener to ourselves it is to slow down and listen to our inner voices. Sometimes we are so wanting to have a friend and or romantic relationship that we do not listen to what our inner voice is saying. As far as listening to others, it is always a work in progress. We have all been there- the person is talking and we are not listening at all. We have to see the humor of these situations. We are trying. The other day someone was talking to me and I got so engrossed in my own thoughts, I almost interrupted them with my own thoughts about an unrelated subject.
I am working on what I will call the pause. This is when someone or something gets you so mad you just want to react. The guy at the party says something insulting to you and you want to say, Hey you so and so. This is where the pause comes, the REFLECTION. Where you just want to see your thoughts, like words going across your mind. This transition could be the power moment. Where we don’t react or if we do it it is in an assertive way. We could say that was offensive. I am working on assertively saying to people, hey you hurt my feelings or something to that effect. This life stuff can be hard, eh? However, I have been enjoying myself more and more. I attribute a lot of this to the life force energy meditation work I have done. While much in life is hard, there is much joy.
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