If you're feeling frustrated, you're normal - but that
doesn't justify your feelings because, as we will discover, normal people are
crazy. In addition, the things that are frustrating you - from a difficult boss
to a difficult relationship, from your business that you think is going nowhere
fast to your apparent lack of ability to lose weight - are no excuse for your
frustration either. The key thing that you've got to understand is that your
frustration is a figment of your imagination, the product of useless thought.
And, as normal people, we're really good at thinking useless thoughts. Most
important of all, if you give in to your frustration, you'll probably give up
on what you think is a lost cause and prove to yourself that you were right to
feel frustrated in the first place! After all, given the way our minds work,
life is a string of self-fulfilling prophecies.
The normal mind is plagued by fifty thousand thoughts each day. Many of them are harmless, some of them give rise to stupid distraction but some of them are toxic. These self-defeating thoughts well up from our subconscious mind which, psychology tells us, is the part of us that creates our self-image and view of the world and, as a consequence, dictates our behaviour. In doing so, our subconscious quite literally creates your life. The subconscious is home to all your perceived inadequacies and it is these that command the greater part of its focus. It is from this well of discontent that seriously useless thoughts, like frustration, come to the surface. In other words, it is not outside events or people that frustrate you - you frustrate yourself. This is the key problem that I want to address.
The normal mind is plagued by fifty thousand thoughts each day. Many of them are harmless, some of them give rise to stupid distraction but some of them are toxic. These self-defeating thoughts well up from our subconscious mind which, psychology tells us, is the part of us that creates our self-image and view of the world and, as a consequence, dictates our behaviour. In doing so, our subconscious quite literally creates your life. The subconscious is home to all your perceived inadequacies and it is these that command the greater part of its focus. It is from this well of discontent that seriously useless thoughts, like frustration, come to the surface. In other words, it is not outside events or people that frustrate you - you frustrate yourself. This is the key problem that I want to address.
As I already said, frustration is a trick of the mind - it is the concrete
result of you paying attention to the useless thoughts that give rise to
frustration. The useless thoughts that we all guard jealously in our
subconscious mind are the product of the things that we learned about life in
general and ourselves in particular during our formative years. As such, these
useless thoughts are never likely to simply vanish into thin are - they are
part and parcel of the human condition. However, as a responsible adult, you
can choose whether or not to pay attention to these thoughts - in other words,
it's time for you to take responsibility for your own state of mind.
As a child, you were expert at focusing on the present moment. If you have or know young children you will understand the extent to which they can easily become fully absorbed in whatever it is that they're doing. A three-year-old opening his or her Christmas gifts uses all of their senses to fully experience the moment - the gift is rattled, smelled, tasted, examined from every angle - the experience leaves no room for attention for anything else. You must regain your childlike ability to see, feel, hear, smell and taste the reality of the moment, even if your apparent reality is one that annoys you of frustrates you. Remember, those feelings have been added to the real reality of the moment by your otherwise preoccupied mind.
The sooner you start your 'focus training' the better. So, after reading this, take a few moments to close your eyes and simply listen to the sounds - the sounds of present moment reality. Each morning you should take a few minutes to pay attention to what each of your five senses, in turn, are telling you. If you start the day in this way, you set yourself up for a completely different experience from the normal day that the normal crazy person creates for themselves.
As a child, you were expert at focusing on the present moment. If you have or know young children you will understand the extent to which they can easily become fully absorbed in whatever it is that they're doing. A three-year-old opening his or her Christmas gifts uses all of their senses to fully experience the moment - the gift is rattled, smelled, tasted, examined from every angle - the experience leaves no room for attention for anything else. You must regain your childlike ability to see, feel, hear, smell and taste the reality of the moment, even if your apparent reality is one that annoys you of frustrates you. Remember, those feelings have been added to the real reality of the moment by your otherwise preoccupied mind.
The sooner you start your 'focus training' the better. So, after reading this, take a few moments to close your eyes and simply listen to the sounds - the sounds of present moment reality. Each morning you should take a few minutes to pay attention to what each of your five senses, in turn, are telling you. If you start the day in this way, you set yourself up for a completely different experience from the normal day that the normal crazy person creates for themselves.
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