Finding Strength By Exploring Weakness You may have heard it before—your greatest gift often comes from exactly what you think your biggest weakness is. They are usually two sides of the same coin. Take neediness for example. Being needy sucks—the needy person feels like someone else holds the key to their happiness, and the person […]
Living the Happy Paradox Overcome the Cultural Bias that Equates Happiness with Progress Within a few years, your iPhone is outdated. Within a few months, the newest hit song is overplayed. And within a week, the big reveal from Game of Thrones is old news. It is easy to get caught up in the zeitgeist of today’s […]
How can I hold both of these seemingly contradictory truths?
I have to let go of the assumption that two contradictory ideas cannot coexist at the same time. Beyond relativism, where I can be both tall and short from different perspectives, it is quite possible to be both happy and sad at the same time—from the same perspective.
Easier said than done. We are socialized to draw distinctions and create absolute boundaries because they can be extremely useful. Yet when it comes to the complexity of the self system, psychology, and human emotion, a more encompassing way of understanding is necessary to be more accurate and caring.
So once I let myself experience both the desire to fix my own problem (of wanting to fix other’s problems), and the desire to not fix my own problem (partly in order to fix it), I relax into that paradox.
And whenever I feel myself relaxing into the paradox in order to resolve it, I notice that and laugh. If I notice myself using that relaxation as a technique to fix myself, I just stay with it, noticing the feelings of disappointment and frustration, of wonder and excitement.
Stop Wasting Your Energy on Things You Can’t Change and Start Changing Those You Can. Put another way, for other people nothing is about you. For you, nothing is about other people. We as humans are really good at internalizing things we have no control over, and externalizing the things we do have control over. […]
A lot of people think spirituality is for softies, but nothing could be further from the truth. To truly live a spiritual life—which might be defined universally as seeking to embody love (God, Enlightenment, Truth) in every action of every day—takes more courage than anything else in the world. What it Takes A person living […]
This is part two of a three-part series on Creating Creativity. For Part 1, click here. In a famous dialogue in one of the Upanishads, a sage asks his student to break a banyan seed, and tell him what’s in the seed. The student breaks the seed, and reports, “Nothing. There’s nothing in the seed!” The […]