There are four days left in the love is happiness adventure, so this may be the last post on LOVE for the month.
Today, I’m going to talk about something I was taught last night at the Meditation Center.
Since the sister I’ve been working with is at the ashram in India for the next few weeks, I sat down with a new teacher and learned to see things in a different light.
I think the first time around when I went to the Meditation Center back in 2008, they were preparing me to become a sister (aka nun) at the Center. That means that I would have chosen to ward off relationships with other people.
This time around, the story is different. When you are not being trained to become a sister, the teachings are very different. I got a little taste of what everyone else was being taught, instead of assisting in the teachings.
In the past, I had seen the quote, “Love Does Not Hurt.” Most times, it refers to people in an abusive relationship. But to hear “In true love there is no sorrow,” it actually makes you think.
The type of relationship (as far as romantic love is concerned) you have is a mirror image of what you have brought into the relationship. If it is filled with love, it reflects. If it is filled with hate, it reflects. If it is filled with anger, it reflects. If it is filled with happiness, it reflects.
While therapists work on your past and why you are the way you are today, they never focus on the now and how to change things from repeating itself. Bad behaviors…pain from a past relationship or a childhood experience…can all be brought into the present. But the question is…do you want to re-live the victim card every single time? Don’t we want to move on and away from that?
Most people don’t realize that you have a choice in how you think and act. Many people feel as if they are guided by their emotions and reactions to situations as they appear. They feel as if they are not in control of what happens next.
What I’ve learned over these years is that we have a choice in controlling the NOW. If we are in a bad mood, the day will get worse and worse as the day moves along because we are attracting bad things to us. We can stop, ask ourselves why we are in a bad mood, decide if we want to continue in that mood (along with all the nasty things that will come because of it) OR change the course of events by putting a stop to that bad mood, saying that ‘I am’ done with it, think good things, so that ‘I’ can spend the remainder of the day reaping the good benefits.
If you think it’s stupid…I’ve been practicing this for 3 years. It works every single time, and if you know how magical my life has been so far…this is how I’ve tapped into that universal magic.
It’s like in wealth. When you give in the service of God (whether it be through good karmic acts or by sharing your wealth with your friends/family) your bounty grows, plus some. You give without asking for anything in return. You give with good thoughts, good positive energy, and good blessings. Then you watch your bank account grow, plus some. Everything in your life grows, plus some.
Sharing the wealth with the Center means telling others about the things I have learned and spreading that knowledge. I can give thanks by bringing in flowers or fresh fruit for the Center, and bestowing universal blessings to all humanity. This is how we gain karmic wealth, because you get back what you put out there, plus some.
Some people believe that bad things happen to good people, but just because a person is good doesn’t mean that they didn’t have a bad day. It doesn’t mean that someone didn’t affect them in a negative way and cause them to be in a bad mood. It doesn’t mean that they didn’t have bad thoughts or bad feelings.
Bad things happen when we allow our mind to be polluted with the pollution of humanity. Just as the ocean can be polluted with toxins, so can our minds.
We all start off on a pure slate. Our minds are pure when we are born. The ocean was pure before man dumped toxins into it. We all started from a moment of purity, before the world polluted it. We can also return to that purity of mind that will allow only good things to happen in our lives.
In relationships, we tend to become attached to the other person. Their drama becomes our drama. We cannot separate ourselves from it. But when you realize that attachments can weigh you down, you realize that you have enslaved yourself to someone else.
Attachment is a word used to define an unhealthy relationship with someone or something. You can’t take them with you when you die. You have only your soul to answer to in the end.
A healthy relationship does not mean attaching yourself to other people or things. Most often, you will find unhappiness and sorrow lurking nearby when you become attached to others or things.
True love means pure love…giving love that is pure, without vices, and watching that love grow and spread out like branches on a tree. When you attach yourself to someone, vices like jealousy pop in. Anger pops in when they do something that you don’t like.
If you truly love that person from the pureness of your heart and soul, these things should not happen, because you will not allow that love to become polluted. Vices should not appear, because you don’t allow them to appear.
In true love there is no sorrow.
If you’ve seen these vices appear, you are not experiencing true love.
In order to experience true love, your love has to truly come from the soul. It’s that same energy of love you receive from God. You take that love and keep it pure by loving others in that same way. Let the mirror reflect that same love without it becoming polluted by vices or everything else out there in the universe that is negative.
You have the power to change the other person in how they love you by keeping the love pure.
Another thing I learned is that things that happen in our lives can cause an imprint on our soul. We replay the same movie again and again in our minds. We think about the things that we would have liked to have said or done.
These imprints on our soul are what we call sanskars (Indian word). In Christianity, it would be similar to Peter going through the list and talking about all of the things (both good/bad) that happened in your life…replaying it before your eyes before the decision is made if you will enter the gates of Heaven or not.
These are the life events that happened to you…where you’ve had no closure. We replay the victim role each time. We hold onto that pain and never release it. We re-live the past, and try to change it each time to where we can say what we really wanted to say to the person that hurt us.
Why are we rehashing the past in the present? Does it change the past? No. It doesn’t benefit you or anyone else. You’re just re-living your role as the victim and not letting go of it. You have to ask yourself, “Do I want to continue to be a victim?”
We all have those moments where someone inflicted severe pain on us. Most of us can’t let go.
If you’ve been following this year’s “Losing 100 Pounds of Unhappiness” adventures into doing something happy every single day, then you would have noticed the change in my life. By focusing on being purely happy, I’ve released the unhappiness inside of myself…that I didn’t even know was there.
The day I embraced my inner child, I uncovered something about myself that I didn’t even know was there. It forced me to confront it and change it right there on the spot. It allowed me to let go of a bad habit.
I let go of someone I loved, because I had to tell myself that no matter how deeply we loved, sometimes it’s not what was fated to be yours. There’s someone better for you out there. You can upgrade. It’s admitting that life can be better than that moment I shared with someone else in the past that helped me to let him go.
I’ve learned to forgive my own mother for hurting me as deeply as she did. She wounded me with vicious words that did not come from love. It was a card on Valentine’s Day that made me remember when that love was pure…but it also made me realize that the pure love was in the past. It was not the present. I forgave her because she had no concept of what she had done to me. There are no words to describe how she made me feel. But it hurt me, and left a deep impression of pain on my soul.
Moving on for yourself means forgiving those that do not comprehend how much they have hurt you. It’s understanding that they will never know or understand. The way things were before that terrible moment…are a memory. It’s the past. That love is not the present. The only thing you must have the strength to do and say is, “It’s out of my hands. I have to turn it over to God.”
Sometimes things are just too big to go at it alone. It’s just best to give it to God and let him handle it. His judgment in the situation is better than anything you can ever think up in your own mind. All you know is that whatever he decides is what is best for everyone, even if the answer is silence between you and the other person, so that you can have peace within your own lives.
It was only after I had done all of these things that my brother told me that our mother felt really bad for what she had done to me. She had told him that she had dreams that I was trying to kill her by stabbing her to death with a knife.
I said, “Yep. That’s exactly what I fantasize about every single time I think of her.”
It was realizing that my anger and hatred towards my mother was really radiating 1000s of miles away that I had to put my thoughts into check. My mother saw exactly what I was feeling.
Perhaps that was God’s way of showing her how wrong her actions were against me, and how it had changed me. It made her feel remorse afterwards. She can’t change the past. She can only accept the present, which is living a life without the daughter she loved. Those are the end results of what happens when you receive the award for inflicting the worst pain ever on another human being that did not ‘ask for it.’
At least I know what God’s decision was in handling the situation. He showed her why there was silence. He showed her the emotions I felt inside. He told her why I felt that way. In the end, she realized that she was not the one that was the victim. She had done those things to me.
A friend of mine said that my reaction was a lot like Christ. When Christ was betrayed, imprisoned based on lies others had told and was thrown up on a cross and left to die…not once did he defend himself. He remained quiet and left his words for God.
By leaving things in God’s hands, he helped me to have closure. He made her understand what she had done to me…and I think in the end, that’s all we want the victimizer to understand.
When you focus on the purity of happiness and love, it’s amazing how much of the good stuff can fill your heart, soul and mind. It doesn’t leave too much room for the bad stuff. The bad stuff ends up coming out of you…you see it, deal with it, heal from it, and move on…just like I was able to do with so much of the unhappiness I faced head on this year.
It’s like in homeopathy…when you first start homeopathic medicine, all of the toxins and bad stuff in your body surfaces and pours out of you any which way it can. In order for the body to heal, when you put the good stuff in…the bad stuff seeps out. After all of the bad stuff leaves, it is only then that you can start the healing process.
With the happiness experiment this year, I have learned that by filling my mind, soul and body with only the good, the unhappiness leaves. All of that unhappiness I carried around with me, buried in each layer of fat, is being released. The fat is melting away. The body is reshaping itself…and it’s all for the better.
When I talk to people about this year’s project, I’m amazed to hear people say, “You’ve got to be on to something…”
When I talk about these things at the Meditation Center, it all rings true in many of their mantras. True love and true happiness are the keys to success in ways that you can’t even imagine.
I have benefitted from it in so many ways. It’s helped me with all of the hurtful imprints on my soul. It has helped my wealth to grow. It has helped my career grow, and offered me opportunities and experiences that seem to be a dream…but it’s my reality. It has taught me how amazing life can be when we put our minds to it.
To summarize what I learned last night…”In true love there is no sorrow”…it has helped me to understand what my focus should be when I approach my next relationship. What I bring into the relationship is a direct mirror image of myself. If I want love and happiness in the purest of forms, I have to be that.
