“Protect yourself from your own thoughts” – Rumi
Hello everyone! I hope you’re waking up to a gorgeous & wonderful day just as I did here in Michigan!
The photo above inspired me to write a blog on inner peace & freedom. Whenever I see this sign hanging by our pool gate, which says “No shoes, No shirt, No problem” I just want to find Kenny Chesney and give him a big hug because that simple phrase makes me feel a great sense of inner freedom & peace. Why? Because it represents an absence of control, rules & judgement.
So often we live with the misconception that we need to control what happens outside of us to experience inner peace and freedom. It would serve us better to accept that how we perceive the unfolding of our life is what causes us to react and suffer. Our perceptions are based on a very personal set of beliefs & thoughts acquired from our personal life experiences & circumstances from the time we were born.
We use our beliefs to make up our own rigid rules in our minds by which things should happen and how people should act around us. When these rules are broken we suffer and instead of revisiting the rules we try to control and change what’s happening on the outside. This in turn causes more stress & suffering because it’s met with great resistance…nobody wants to be forcefully controlled or changed by another. Unless you can convince a person that listening to you is in his or her own best self-interest, you are wasting valuable time & energy. This futile attempt is ultimately devoiding us of freedom & peace.
Here it is folks… our belief system becomes outdated just as a computer program does, and by revisiting and upgrading frequently we can find inner peace & freedom that immensely improve the quality of our life!
One upgrade we can install right away is to stop taking what happens around us personally. There’s some priceless advice Don Miguel Ruiz gives us in his book “The Four Agreements”. He urges us to make the following agreement with ourselves: “Don’t take anything personally.”
When we agree not to take things personally, we regard all attempts by others to control us as statements about themselves, not about us. By refusing to take threats, criticism, complaints, praise, or disapproval personally, we act upon our own reality, not theirs.
Life doesn’t happen to us, it’s simply unfolding in our presence. With each unfolding we can choose to be the spectator or we can choose to be the director. As a spectator we observe the movie of life play in front of us, we fully experience the emotions that are triggered but we are very deliberate about simply clapping or stepping in to become the director.
Have an awesome day!
Much love, Dee! ❤️
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