Non-duality: Being Negative, and Trying to be Happy.

Silver lining in the darkest clouds! Source: Google Images

I woke up late today- at 11: 30 AM. I was okay, then. A few hours later, though, I began to feel something strange. I was feeling anxious, restless, dull, and many more. I just hate these creepy feelings! My heartbeat seemed to race abnormally high that left me in a complete scare. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I was very certain I was still breathing-alive. So I recomposed myself, monitored my breath, and lay back -hoping to calm myself. Just on time, quite coincidentally, I remember what I read in Mingyur Rinpoche’s book of “Joyful Wisdom” about tackling the stress, and the so called abnormal feelings. His Eminence provides the ways and methods to approach the stress, and help tackle it. Loosely paraphrasing, he advises to confront the stress directly rather than shying away and avoiding it for it will become worse. Digging deeper, and figuring out the source(s) of stress is what one of the authors of New York Times Bestseller the “Joy Of Living” is talking about and meaning when he said to “confront it”.

Thanks your Holiness for your, indeed, “Joyful Wisdom(s)”. Although I may not have nailed all that Holiness has mentioned about tackling the stress, I tried my best, and it seems to be working. Deep down in my mind I knew I didn’t have any valid reasons to be feeling the way it did, so I traced it back to their root causes. Eventually, I came to know that I was being too negatively judgmental about myself. That seemed to have resulted in such feelings, a creepy one.

Negative feelings don’t need to necessarily arise from negative sources. Sometimes they don’t even need any external sources. Our mind makes everything up, and the body bears the brunt of it. Today I am alone at home. My roommates just left for a weeklong trip to NYC earlier today. The house looks abandoned and quiet. I feel lonely, and sad. When everybody seems to make great time out of the vacation, and specifically coming of the New Year, I am a guy confined in this house without any plans. It makes me sad having to stay at home and nothing productive to do. I am not privileged of such enjoyments and merrymaking. I watch guitar-lesson tutorials, get crazed about it, I try playing, I fail and then I become upset. I chat with friends, they seem joyful, and I feel sorry about myself. So and so forth contributes to unease feelings, restlessness, and low self-esteem.

But in considering all those mentioned afore, what I haven’t noticed or failed altogether is to look at the positive part of my life. Yes, I’ve truly failed. If I put his Holiness’s approach into practice, I find so many things in me to feel happy about. There was absolutely no point to feel the way I began to feel. It was because of my truer perspective gotten clouded by negative aspects of mine. It does no good, but results in low self-esteem. I have felt carried away by someone else’s good things that I completely failed to acknowledge some goodness that resides in me all the time. I am battling with spotting a silver lining in the darkest clouds. It isn’t easy, but certainly not impossible. If one is very true to oneself, and acknowledges the goodness in you, there is no reason to feel dejected about anything. Good and bad are not absolute entities; they depend heavily on one’s reference point. So what I learnt today in quest of tackling my stress is that we always have to try to look at the brighter and positive side, than worrying about the negative sides. We have everything that takes to make oneself capable of being a good human being, but what we lack is our truer sense of looking at us. So assessing oneself, being contented, and remedying the stress is very tantamount in making a happy living.