When we follow our true path in life, we live peacefully and with abundance. So what is it that stops so many of us from living the life we want?
There are many psychological therapies offered nowadays, promising to empower us in moving on from jaundiced thoughts, emotional traumas and the sheer practical difficulties of everyday human living. However, there is much we can do for ourselves, without relying on therapy, to live ‘more abundantly’ in a spiritual sense. This means, I suggest, living each day with peace and contentment.
Now, that might sound rather dull and boring in today’s fast society but really we’re talking about having a tranquil and calm mind, free of those ruminating thoughts and critical judgements that often control our daily lives. (They can ruin our nights too when they are so deeply entrenched that we keep processing them again and again when we go to bed.) When we’re not at peace and we allow our energies to be focused on disempowering thoughts, we can create defeatist phrases within our minds such as, “Everything goes wrong for me… I wish I had done this (or said that)… there’s no point trying that because it will never work out… why can’t they just…?” Haven’t we all said these things to ourselves at times? But such negative thoughts only conditions us to carry on experiencing lack and missed opportunities, and even perhaps subconsciously encourages us to ignore our own responsibilities; we start to expect other people to ‘make things happen’ and we hold them responsible for events in our lives, becoming even more disappointed when ‘they’ seem to have ‘failed’ us. It can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Mahatma Gandhi said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” So how do we change to a more peaceful and calm state?
The essential first step has to be acceptance. Life happens and we all encounter difficulties to varying degrees, some of them really serious, at different stages of our journey. This is simply the nature of human life. If we can accept this and not beat ourselves up when things go wrong, but look instead at the available options for moving forward, there can be a major shift in our perception. It’s like taking a leaf from the corporate world’s attitude of ‘damage limitation’ – something has gone wrong but let’s see what can be done to encourage the next best possible outcome. This might seem an unemotional response to a problem but it allows us to think outside the box, free to imagine transformations rather than be tied down by those victim-based stories.
The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote the well-known Serenity Prayer and perhaps we should all seek “…the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Serenity describes a peaceful state of accepting what happens, calmly empowering us to attend to change. Our experiences have created the person we are now, and wouldn’t it feel great to be able to say about ourselves, “I like who I am”? Let’s use our experiences as catalysts to change so that we can rise from any ashes.
Yes, it can be challenging to change our deeply-held beliefs. We may have given so much of our energies to limiting beliefs over the years that when we begin saying goodbye to them we can miss them like departed friends. Then it’s possible that we become dispirited about our strategies for change, so that our new aspirations perhaps fall by the wayside and we start to believe that change was unrealistic anyway.
But the Serenity Prayer reminds us that it requires courage to change, so we must be mindful of this and find that courage within ourselves to boost our confidence when necessary. Courage will be vital for us when our self-belief is lacking. Courage will be required when we change our normal patterns of behaviour (such as for example signing up for an art class to develop new personal relationships when previously we’ve only used social media due to our shyness). Courage will be required to stop ourselves setting limits to our goals, such as, “I will be at peace/happy when… occurs.” This is just procrastination in another form, a device to release us from the guilt that might arise if we don’t take action.
Courage will certainly also be required to change our perception of a trauma from despair to gratitude. The energetic vibration of genuine gratitude is powerful in bringing about changes in our outlook on life. If we can learn to look on a serious challenge or trauma for the wisdom we can gain from the experience – and be grateful for this wisdom – then this is just the spark needed to ignite a transformation of our lives.
An abundant life is one of contentment, of tranquility, satisfaction and happiness. Such contentment arises with the wisdom gained from our experiences, from having future plans and from acknowledging with heartfelt gratitude what we have achieved in our lives.
Living in contentment can allow us to ‘follow our bliss’ and naturally cultivate life-affirming pathways, helping us to develop emotional resilience when curve-balls arise. Contentment with our life’s journey becomes food for the soul as we align ourselves with a joyful approach to everyday life. This in turn provides the basis for calm inner reflection, honouring our feelings and helping us to make healthy and happy changes. When we treat each day as a new beginning and deliberately choose to live in peace and contentment, we attract the same harmonic vibrations to ourselves. These help us to build strong foundations so that we are able to nurture ourselves – and others – and release ourselves from the ‘ought to/need to/should do’ scenarios.
When we embrace the many positive possibilities that life offers, the high vibrations of peace and contentment naturally attract the abundance of the universe. Our energies then change to acceptance, gratitude, joyfulness and compassion. This is an abundant life, one that opens us up to our true purposes.
Sandra Bray is the author of Odd Days of Heaven, a guide book for the spiritual journey with nearly two hundred suggestions for activities sure to lift your spirits – or even change your life.
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