It's often said in 'The Secret' that the law of attraction will get you far in life, and positive thinking attracts positive things your way. But there's something missing from this equation. I like to call it "Let the Universe Give You a Hug."
This principle is very simple. Whenever something bad, untoward, or unlucky happens, immediately stop, and think about how much you wish someone would tell you everything is going to be alright. Then tell yourself, instead of everything is going to be alright, that you deserve a big hug, and that even though it's not perfect life you have, the universe loves you anyways.
The reason this is so important is because positive thinking doesn't work well when something bad happens to us. Humans are cautious by nature, and feel like they can expect bad things over time. During a 'bad time' or 'a stroke of bad luck' we still need a way to weather stormy times. Because positive thinking doesn't always bring good things our way. Sometimes it brings bad things our way.
From the thinking side of things, it's important we think about why things happen to us so we can move on with our lives. Otherwise, we repeat the same mistakes, over and over again. And that's bad.
From the practical side of things, I find the desire to get a giant hug from something bigger and paternal key to making this make me feel infinitely better. Because I think love is what you need to be happy in life, and how we should measure ourselves is not when things are great, but when things are difficult. We all need a little love from something bigger than us when things are hard.
So let the universe give you a hug. It's feel really nice.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Sunday, August 12, 2012
TOW: Adult Fears
"Ostensibly healthy
life is interspersed with a great number of trivial and in practice
unimportant symptoms [...] neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity." -Sigmund Freud
It's funny how the things that you disliked as a child or teenager become things you hate and fear the older you get.
For example, I used to dislike bugs when I was a child, or messes, when I was younger. Now that I'm older, I find that even seeing a messy kitchen or a messy room can stress me out, and bugs in general I scream like a little girl whenever I see them. (Although maybe that wasn't that different than when I was a child.)
Back in the day, I might have had a slightly negative reaction, but the older I get, I find my reactions to negative events in my life to be more and more extreme.
And it's not just me who feels this way. There's the cafe mocha drinking-lady who starts yelling at the streetcar driver if she misses her streetcar, dashing in high heels while carrying a Starbucks pastry of some kind. There's the old lady who doesn't get on the subway because it's too full of people. There's the businessman who won't talk to his female colleagues because he's intimidated by them. And most of these things are things that happened in childhood, or young adulthood, and have become pressure points for us.
Freud called these neuroses: they were things that we couldn't process because they caused us pain, and we can only now go on to start to deal with them. Maybe that old lady had a traumatic experience in a crowd when she was younger. Maybe the businessman was laughed at by a group of girls during high school. We all create mechanisms or warning signs to stop up from having unpleasant experiences.
And herein lies the kicker: We want psychological cues that protect us from events, but we want them to be black and white. There can be no good crowds, no good events of missing the streetcar, no good can come from treating your female colleagues well, etc. We have our frame of reference, and flawed or not, we feel better holding onto it than changing it for the better. Most of the time, this is a fairly harmless way to live.
The problem is when our neuroses stop helping us achieve a normal, pleasurable life, and start taking away from it. The neurotic person that needs treatment simply has more debilitating symptom-formations that prevent enjoyment and active achievement in life.
As an adult, we all have fears. We all have things that we wished hadn't happened to us, and we wish we had done. But the crux of a happy life resides in being able to shape our own bad habits into something useful to us, a weapon against all the bad things that happen to us. Otherwise, those protective elements in our lives stop protecting us, and simply cut us off from the society we should enjoy. To live life well is a life with fewer fears rather than more fears, and a good life is one that is free of those fears that stop us from achieving success in our personal and public lives.
It's funny how the things that you disliked as a child or teenager become things you hate and fear the older you get.
For example, I used to dislike bugs when I was a child, or messes, when I was younger. Now that I'm older, I find that even seeing a messy kitchen or a messy room can stress me out, and bugs in general I scream like a little girl whenever I see them. (Although maybe that wasn't that different than when I was a child.)
Back in the day, I might have had a slightly negative reaction, but the older I get, I find my reactions to negative events in my life to be more and more extreme.
And it's not just me who feels this way. There's the cafe mocha drinking-lady who starts yelling at the streetcar driver if she misses her streetcar, dashing in high heels while carrying a Starbucks pastry of some kind. There's the old lady who doesn't get on the subway because it's too full of people. There's the businessman who won't talk to his female colleagues because he's intimidated by them. And most of these things are things that happened in childhood, or young adulthood, and have become pressure points for us.
Freud called these neuroses: they were things that we couldn't process because they caused us pain, and we can only now go on to start to deal with them. Maybe that old lady had a traumatic experience in a crowd when she was younger. Maybe the businessman was laughed at by a group of girls during high school. We all create mechanisms or warning signs to stop up from having unpleasant experiences.
And herein lies the kicker: We want psychological cues that protect us from events, but we want them to be black and white. There can be no good crowds, no good events of missing the streetcar, no good can come from treating your female colleagues well, etc. We have our frame of reference, and flawed or not, we feel better holding onto it than changing it for the better. Most of the time, this is a fairly harmless way to live.
The problem is when our neuroses stop helping us achieve a normal, pleasurable life, and start taking away from it. The neurotic person that needs treatment simply has more debilitating symptom-formations that prevent enjoyment and active achievement in life.
As an adult, we all have fears. We all have things that we wished hadn't happened to us, and we wish we had done. But the crux of a happy life resides in being able to shape our own bad habits into something useful to us, a weapon against all the bad things that happen to us. Otherwise, those protective elements in our lives stop protecting us, and simply cut us off from the society we should enjoy. To live life well is a life with fewer fears rather than more fears, and a good life is one that is free of those fears that stop us from achieving success in our personal and public lives.
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