Lessons

If we look hard enough, the whole world is our teacher, people can teach us an abundance of lessons that there is no shortage of. The importance of having the best intentions at heart, about love, life, relationships and so on. My relationships have taught me  a lot about love; that it cannot be forced, it cannot be manipulated and those seeking control over you is not love. It is them trying to shape you into who they see you as, not who you really are, having to adhere to their expectations of you is also tiring. No matter how much you pretend that to be so. 

True love gives us freedom, we don’t feel trapped or feel like a piece of us is missing, we don’t feel disrespected, we feel complete, free to be ourselves and we’re accepted unconditionally because they do not try to change us. We are loved for our flaws, our talents, our unique character, it is important that we honor our own truth, we abide to our own ways of seeing ourselves not what others want us to be.

I have tried unburden many people as possible from heartache, but it is not something you can take away, its only something they can do with self-exploration and time.  By really knowing who it is you want to be with, you must know yourself and love yourself first. It’s cliché but its true and its not always easy to do. Love can be messy at times, and so can heart ache, but life can’t be without its struggles, otherwise we’d never learn.

Through this journey of self-exploration I learnt one major fear of mine, which is the fear of happiness. Now it might sound silly, but its centred around the impermanence of happiness that terrifies me. I spoke to a girl called Veronica and she reached out the following message to a group of people ‘I always used to think that if I get a happy moment, it must end with a bad thing, like a punishment... But when I started thinking the opposite, it changed everything. So now when I'm going through a difficult lifetime, I know that it's for a reason and it's a challenge and I need to win that to get the happy ending. It's like a game with different stages and every stage has it's own difficulties, but we still play it because we want to know what good thing we're going to get in the end. What I'm trying to say is that our life is a place where we fight for our happiness and everyone deserves to be happy. And if something is going wrong, think that it's for a reason. Stay strong’

If I see my happiness waning, it is for a reason, it’s because hardships make us stronger, it is because life can’t always be sunshine and rainbows all the time. To know happiness we must know sadness, to know love we must know heartache, to appreciate life we must know grief. I know the dualities are cruel and unappealing, but they are necessary for us to learn how to cope with the opposite. If the way we think about something makes us unhappy then we must change it; if we perceive each struggle as a way that we can never be happy that it will always be fleeting and unattainable. Whereas, if we perceive every struggle as a lesson, our thinking shifts because we're thinking from the perspective of empowerment rather than dis-empowerment. 

Fundamentally, we all have the basic human tendencies to: seek happiness, to belong, to be loved and to have a purpose. ‘Nothing is either bad or good but thinking makes it so’ – William Shakespeare’  -  I believe it is quite possible that thinking too much can be a bad thing, that’s why Buddhism teaches us to see the world with a beginner’s mind. We must be careful what we spend our energies thinking about and we must reflect with a forgiving heart, not see the world as our enemies, but as our family and as our teachers.

For example if you’re jealous or you strongly dislike or hate someone,  it is because something about them reflects within you, or your past self and experience that you didn’t particularly like. That alone is a lesson you can either avoid or seek to learn more about yourself and confront that fear, instead of letting fear drive you, let faith drive you, that doesn’t have to be taken in a religious context. Faith means complete trust in something, so why not put that faith in ourselves and our ability to live our life to our fullest potential?

~ Namaste