Becoming Friends With Ourselves to Alter your Mood

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
The Ten Largest, No. 6

 

AS LIVING BEINGS, our deepest wish is to be happy, peaceful and free from suffering. When we operate on the premise that the causes of happiness and suf fering lie outside of ourselves in other people, possessions, positions or places we often quarrel with others, disparage them, try to ruin their reputation, steal from them or even physically harm them. Holding the view that happiness comes from outside drags us into a tug of war with the external world, as we try to get what we like and think will make us happy and try to avoid what we dislike and believe will cause us pain. However, we will never succeed in changing other people or the environment into what we want them to be. Even if we could manage to get everything just the way we want it, in the next moment things would change. We would end up living in a state of constant frustration and anxiety, feeling that our emotions and our lives are beyond our control.

In this process we fail to look inside ourselves and to realize that it is how we are thinking, interpreting and viewing situa tions that determines whether we are happy or miserable. With a little reflection, this fact becomes evident. Remember a day when you were in a bad mood even though nothing special happened to provoke it. It is likely that found you many of the people you encountered that day to be rude and disagreeable. Meanwhile on the days when you Are in a good mood, even if you get some unexpected criticism, you're able to listen and take it in. This demonstrates that our moods influence how we interpret the situations we encounter and thus how experience them. we experience them  

Nowhere in our present education system are we taught to observe how our internal moods and ideas influence whether we experience delight or unhappiness. Instead, we buy into the idea that happiness comes from outside of ourselves, for exam peo ple, from material possessions or other people. When we think like this, it is easy to become self-centered, viewing other ple as if their only purpose is to bring us happiness, and if they do not do a very good job of it, we feel that we're entitled to complain. When our happiness is dependent on the actions of others, which are out of our control, we will never be happy.

For this reason, setting aside some time each day for spiri tual practice is important. This is a quiet time that we can use to "get in touch" with ourselves, to become our own friend. We check in with ourselves,"What is of real importance in my life? How do I feel? What are the ethical principles that guide my life?" If our minds are filled with many confusing thoughts or emotions, we can use this time to meditate or do spiritual reading in order to rebalance ourselves. In this to live with integrity, in a way that corresponds to our ethical principles and not just chase after external things in order to way, we learn convince others and ourselves that we have a life." We need to treat ourselves with respect, not self-indulgence, can cultivate our good qualities and counteract our so that we faults.

It is often said that to feel love and compassion for others we must first feel love and compassion for ourselves. A lack of love and compassion for ourselves leads to harsh criticism of ourselves, which, in turn, carries over to how we feel about and speak to others. Furthermore, a judgmental attitude to wards ourselves will make us miserable and inhibit us from cultivating and experiencing love and compassion. Therefore it is important to become friends with ourselves, having a caring attitude  and be kind when talking to ourselves.