Life is Hard: Want Serenity?

From time to time I have to give myself a once-over, checking to make sure I never succumb to another of life’s innumerable addictions. I’ve had too many, and most are tamed and living in their temples or cages. But once in a while I get blue, or confused, or too sad or too involved with others stuff, as I have in the past. My own stuff is the worse, of course.

Who wants to be a whiner? No One! Positively no one admits they like being a victim to their own addiction. It’s hard to believe putting oneself down, self-hatred, or being upset with other people’s nonsense, is enough to knock us off our axis of serenity.

In my life I’d had such attacks of low that I’m on the floor in a fetal position. At my lowest, right then, I hardly am able to believe I could ever be happy, or certainly feel I have anything at all interesting or viable to offer the  world.

Rare are the times like these, I’m happy to report, that continue to persist.

Younger, and less comfortable traveling the middle road, hugging the center of serenity if ever I have the choice, I was knocked off my center — more times than I’d like to admit.

Once upon a time, I even “lost my mind” … had a “psychic shock” … drifted from reality so much so that it took tranquilizing medication and weeks of clearing to heal from. So I know about a troubled mind.

This, today, is how I’ve learned to keep my mind in a blissful state, even when life sucks all around me, outside my mind. Life is hard. Its unexplained and especially unanticipated events can really knock a person’s wind right out of their sails.

I recently have gone through this once again. Even with all the meditating, yoga, self-nurturing. When down-ness strikes, if I’m not vigilant with my balancing act: I even end up questioning my blind passion to arting, writing, painting, drawing, designing, and all sundry forms of storytelling. It’s only then, in depression, that I doubt this urge I’ve had since childhood, about casting out  a mesmerizing word-image spell as a cool theme for the world to ponder.

These are good things to ask myself. The reward of self-reflexion: bringing up the Inner Light! I invite you here to join me, if you wish.

When a person gets still enough, and then turns one’s focus onto the inner realms, and then watch … and feel … and allow the energy within (kundalini) which often arises as a “feeling of stillness, of Oneness, of non-thinking” to guide one toward, what for that person, is their highest: this is spiritual manna. Whatever that means to anyone. Being clear enough in our awakened, stilled mind, we can trust our own “gut feelings.” It’s only when I doubt that that I get down.

A person’s highest. Ahhh, what does that mean? To Me? To You?

I believe most people I talk to who have had anxiety, depression, deep insecurity, and all the other junk that I, too, like we all do, have had in various dosages in my corrugated past. There are certain of us who perhaps are not aware that they persist in, as I used to do, choosing the lower state of mind over the higher possibilities. Today I have tools to make sure I’m choosing the highest, for me. Only for me.

Making a Choice, that is, about being bad or being good, being content or down, is harder for some of us than others. I’ve always had an attraction to the shadowy side of life. The underbelly. The raw ripeness of human encounters. It’s been one of the highs of my life to discovery each and every one of them and how to use them on my quest for the ultimate. It’s helped me aim for the highest when I’ve seen what the lowest is capable of.

Truly, the Allure of Panic and Drama used to run strongly in my veins.

Low or High — we all have, many times — a Choice

The lower choice for me, is to believe those varied, or that one singular voice, — the familiar, yet gross-to-hear one that whispers in the furthest reaches of my mind, “Life is scary.” Today I remember that voice is not who I am. That voice is a lie. It is someone else’s lie, the worse kind of lie a person can have. It was implanted into my brain’s functioning by the earliest impressions going on around me (the simple answer); or (harder-to-swallow version) that voice is an echo of my soul’s “need to search.

Each of us were born into this incarnation with our particular set of stuff we gotta work out. My stuff is What makes me think God’s taking care of me? How could I be so stupid, so ignorant, so … all the lowest programming-lie that can go on in a person’s insecurities. Only when I recognize it’s going on can I stop it. Stop the lies. Someone else’s lies. Right now. No more lies.

To admit they’re there, that’s the first part of how I can change things around.

The rest is just repetition, repetition, repetition … fake it till I make it … don’t ever stop trying to change! I become my own cheerleader … until I reach contentment once again.

That’s what choice is all about: believing I have the ability to change. First I change myself. Then maybe someone or something else can benefit from my personal triumph, living from consciousness instead of emotions.

Here’s a good place to start. Replace the “old lies” with this “New Truth!”

Repeat the Serenity Prayer over and over, day after day, whenever you need some more strength and conviction. Trust me. Repeating this short prayer works! At times in my journey I have constantly repeated it, like a mantra.

Memorize it, and attach it to your breath. Now, watch your life change before your very eyes!

the Cosmic Egg: We R 1

The Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

La Benedicíon Serenidad

Díos, me da la serenidad para aceptar las cosas que no puedo cambiar, el valor para aceptar las que se puedo, y la suburduria para reconocer la diferencia.