Powerlessness Over Other People

Letting Go, Peace, Relationships 0

Accepting our powerlessness over other people doesn’t come without strong resistance, intense mental focus, near constant practice of letting go, and unyielding willingness to understand that other people simply can’t be controlled!  Our disbelief about our powerlessness is evident everywhere — in our dysfunctional homes, among disgruntled employees, within the power structure of every government around the world.  Every war ever fought is strong evidence that people everywhere continue to believe they have the power to control others.  However, one side seldom wins.  More commonly, the vanquished simply give up.

If having a peaceful life is our goal, then we must give up unpeaceful behaviors.  Making the decision to free all of those people in our lives from our misguided attempts to control them is a great first step.

— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, p. 64

Whose Business?

Letting Go, Peace 0

The next time you’re feeling stress or discomfort, ask yourself whose business you’re in mentally, and you may burst out laughing!  That question can bring you back to yourself.  And you may come to see that you’ve never really been present, that you’ve been mentally living in other people’s business all your life.  Just to notice that you’re in someone else’s business can bring you back to your own wonderful self.

— Byron Katie, Loving What Is, p. 3

Angry or Joyful

Joy, Letting Go, Life, Peace 0

Starting arguments, blaming others, or internalizing anger is not the way to go through life.  Treat the problem knowing that you will get through it, and you will be a better person because of it.  Remember, you can spend your life being angry or joyful.  You control only one thing: your thoughts.  So find the serenity within yourself.  Or as my wife says, “Never go to bed mad.  Stay up and fight.”  Keep your sense of humor, express your feelings, and recognize your power, and you will spend more time at peace than at war.

— Bernie Siegal, M.D., Love, Magic & Mudpies, p. 186

Don’t Get Ahead of Your Nose

God, Letting Go, Life, Peace 0

God’s presence can’t be experienced except moment by moment, and that means we have to show up in each moment.  Getting ahead of this moment in regard to our relationships, our vocations, our dreams, and aspirations simply prevents us from knowing God. . . .

In my role as a mentor to a number of young women, I often say, “Don’t get ahead of your nose.”  It’s a great reminder that one is projecting, and it quickly brings us back to the present.  I also suggest that whenever thoughts of the future come into your mind, you envision blowing them away.  This may sound silly but it’s effective.  I have used it for years.

Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, p. 29

Making It Happen

Letting Go, Life, Peace 0

Stop trying so hard to make it happen.

Stop doing so much, if doing so much is wearing you out or not achieving the desired results.  Stop thinking so much and so hard about it.  Stop worrying so about it.  Stop trying to force, to manipulate, to coerce, or to make it happen.

Making things happen is controlling.  We can take positive action to help things happen.  We can do our part.  But many of us do much more than our part.  We overstep the boundaries from caring and doing our part into controlling, caretaking, and coercing.

Controlling is self-defeating.  It doesn’t work.  By overextending ourselves to make something happen, we may actually be stopping it from happening.

Do your part in relaxed, peaceful harmony.  Then let it go.  Just let it go.  Force yourself to let it go, if necessary.  “Act as if.”  Put as much energy into letting go as you have into trying to control.  You’ll get much better results.

— Melody Beattie, The Language of Letting Go, p. 206-207

Letting Go of How Others Live

Letting Go, Peace, Relationships 0

Our spouses, our friends, our family, our neighbors, even the strangers crossing our paths, must be who they are, not who we think they should be.  They must make their own mistakes and, through what they learn, have reason to celebrate their own successes.

There are many reasons for letting go of this futile behavior, but the most important ones are that we will never succeed in controlling others and never experience peace in our own lives if we are always focused on how other people are living or how we think they should be living.  If we want to be peaceful, we must let go of how others choose to live and take care of business in one life only:  our own.

— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, p. 9-10

Living Today

Joy, Life, Peace 0

I find myself planning and working for the future, for payoffs and rewards in a month or a year, for which I am willing to pay with happiness now.  Only to find of course that there is always another month, another year to wait.  True, the future must be planned for, and there are surely rewards tomorrow for prudent action today.  But somehow, I am learning, I must discover how to live a life of happiness today.  Not someday when things quiet down and there’s enough in the bank and I’ve gotten beyond these problems — but today.  The idea that we can live temporarily unhappy lives in pursuit of payday/someday, when we will be set for life and ready for happiness, is a sad illusion.

Life is of a piece.  The future is woven of the thread we spin today.  It is silly to imagine that a “temporary” life of tension and stress is preparing us for a future day of relaxation and peace; that a provisional life spent compromising our ideals and deferring our deepest longings will one day give way to a future of fulfillment and deep joy.  It doesn’t work.  “What shall it profit a man,” Jesus asked, “if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”  You can’t live a soul-ebbing life and somehow pull out happiness in the end.

In a culture of achievement we naturally assume a path to happiness:  get on it, do the work, and — enduring a baleful journey of indeterminate years — you will eventually arrive at bliss.  But there is no path to happiness, only a path of happiness.  In other words, happiness is a state, not a destination.

— David Anderson, Breakfast Epiphanies:  Finding wonder in the Everyday, p. 88-89

In Charge of No One But Ourselves

Letting Go, Life, Parenting, Peace, Relationships 0

It bears repeating:  We are not in charge of others!  Not their behavior, their thoughts, their dreams, their problems, their successes, or their failures.

Even the children we parent have their own journey to make, and our so-called control over them is, in fact, an illusion.  We can set an example for them, we can suggest a set of behaviors, we can demonstrate a code of ethics, we can even require that they live by certain “house rules” while under our roof, but finally it is they who will decide who they want to be and what they want to do, regardless of our efforts.  And for that we will become grateful in time.

I say:  Let’s celebrate the fact that we are in charge of no one but ourselves.  It relieves us of a heavy burden, and a thankless job, one that never blesses us.  Taking control of every thought we have and every action we take, and being willing to relinquish the past while savoring the present, will assuredly keep us as busy as we need to be.  Doing these things, and only these things is why we are here.  It’s only when we live our own lives and manage our own affairs, freeing others to do the same, that we find the peace we seek and so deserve.

— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow:  12 Simple Principles, p. 8-9