Do me a favor. Look at where you are in your life right now and ask are you where you want to be right now? Do you have a mother in law that is toxic? Are you in a relationship that is full of pettiness and dysfunction? What are your actual circumstances? What is holding you back? Why are you not able to reach the goals you want?
Many people want to point to our circumstances as the root of our pain and suffering. You were abused. You had a bad childhood. Your parents didn’t care about you. That Boss of yours is a jerk. The car shit the bed. Your wife doesn’t want sex. The wife wants a divorce or doesn’t love you anymore. The kids are disrespectful and are rebelling.
Find something that is causing you pain and look at it. Now grab a piece of paper and write everything you think of about that circumstance down on paper. Get it all out and on to paper. We will come back to that paper here in a bit.
Today I would like for you to examine your circumstances. All that stuff that is keeping you small. Keeping you from the success you dreamed of when you were younger. We as humans like to point fingers and that finger is often pointed at the circumstance of your life. That one finger you are pointing with is pointing the wrong way. Those other three fingers are pointing to the real culprit. Let's dive in.
What is a Circumstance?
It is always good to start with a definition. That way we are on the same page when it comes to the words we are using. So a circumstance is the facts of a situation. That is all there are no emotions or descriptors in your circumstance.
For example:
- You have a $500 a month house payment
- You have a mother in law
- You have a job
- You have a son
- Your Wife said, “I want a divorce”
Circumstances are not opinions
- You have too many bills
- Your wife is mad at you all the time
- Your boss is an asshole
- You don't make enough money
- You can't figure it out
Yeah, these seem true but they aren’t. They are in fact, thoughts about a circumstance. They are not the circumstances themselves.
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Accept that you have no control
You have no control over a circumstance. None whatsoever. The only thing you have control over is the thoughts you have about the circumstance. You can’t control your kids. You can influence them to do what you want. Yet you can't actually control whether they choose to do so.
You can teach your son not to cheat on a test or to steal the candy bar. You can show him the ramifications of his actions and that is a learning experience for him. From there he can choose whether he will do it again. If he didn’t learn the first time then he will face the test again. That is beyond your scope of control. All you have is your thoughts about the circumstance that your son cheated on a test.
The interesting thing about circumstances is that all circumstances are neutral. They are not good nor are they bad. A circumstance just is. It's the facts of your world.
What do you mean a circumstance isn’t good or bad?!?
Wait wait wait! Am I saying your child dying is good? That seems pretty bad to you, right?
No, I'm saying it's neither good nor bad. That is until you have a thought about it. Then with that thought, you have the emotions that come from that thought. Say you were at work and it was a good day. Your day didn’t go crappy the moment your child died. It goes crappy the moment you hear about the death and you apply a thought to it.
Before knowing the circumstance had no effect on you. You were just going about your day. Then BOOM! You find out your son was hit by a bus and your thoughts about the circumstance start to pile on. Did the bus driver stop? Why was he in the street? Was he pushed in front of the bus? What am I going to do! Why was my son taken from me? How will I tell my wife? Does my wife know? I will kill whoever did this! I am so heartbroken. I am so mad. I am so grief-stricken.
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All of those were thoughts about the circumstance. Maybe your son is racked in pain from cancer and it was a waiting game. You are already sad and heartbroken about him being in the hospital suffering the pains of his cancer. Then he dies and you are sad yes but you are also relieved that he is not in pain anymore.
The son dying is still the circumstance. Yet you are able to actually see that it would be a little easier to let him go because of his suffering.
Let's step away from the morbid and look at a different circumstance. You were passed up for a promotion. This promotion was something you were needing, and your boss gave it to a guy who had been at your organization for half the time you have been slaving away. Now you have a series of thoughts you could have. You could have the thought that he is a really great guy who deserves that promotion or you could have a very negative thought about this promotion.
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The difference is again the thoughts you are having about that circumstance. My favorite example is you and your friend go watch the same movie at the same time in the same theater. You both walk out and have a completely different thought on the show. You may have loved the show while your friend absolutely hated it. How is that possible? It was the very same movie? The difference is the thoughts you and your friend have about the movie.
Your thoughts make your reality. This is why some people do stuff that you think is dumb. To them, it was a good idea at the time. Sounded good on paper. We all have thoughts, some folks think it is upwards of 60,000 thoughts. Some are automatic and some are just repeats of the same circumstance from different angles. Other people just flat out obsess over stuff that they can't control and this is where suffering comes into play.
Then where is my pain coming from?
It comes from your thoughts. Be it emotional or physical, your pain comes from your thoughts. Yeah, physical pain comes from a circumstance but the pain often isn’t as bad as you think it is. If you focus on the pain and how much it hurts and why it hurts the pain does intensify. That is why some people can break a toe and literally walk it off. While others get a hangnail and are practically bedridden. It is not a higher pain tolerance as it is that some folks think of their pain more.
This is also why people who are depressed often have more pain and they focus on the pain more. They often have more headaches and body aches. The Brain actually can’t tell the difference between physical and emotional pain. It is all processed in the same area of the mind.
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What you feel and how you react to that pain is based on the thoughts you have. If you allow yourself to think of a hurtful experience, and you then try to avoid the pain you are not helping yourself. You are not processing the pain and adding more pain to the mix because you are resisting the emotional experience.
Are emotions pleasant? About 50% of the time the other 50% of the time the emotions are unpleasant. You can choose to accept and process the pain or you can avoid it. This will actually cause more pain in the long run because running from pain only increases the suffering in your life. You may buffer from the pain but that doesn’t solve the problem. The problem is how you think of the circumstance that you are thinking of.
You have a choice. You can think of a circumstance as good or as bad. That is your choice and how you think of that circumstance your life will follow that line. You can accept that there is a pain in the world, and you can be OK with it or you can run from it. That discomfort will eventually grow into suffering. So the choice is yours.
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