
“You are not required to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm.”
– unknown
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The above reminds me of this very empowering quote by Abraham Hicks – “it is not your job to keep others happy and it is not their job to keep you happy”. It is your job to make yourself happy and it is their job to make themselves happy. Each one of us has the potential, the ability to feel happy through the power of our own focus, our thoughts much more than we give ourselves credit for. When you let yourself off the hook and let others off the hook too, can you imagine the deliciousness of that feeling? Two happy people savoring life coming together to further savor the awesomeness of the moments together. Can you imagine the power of that?
We are uplifters and it does feel good when we uplift others. When someone comes up to us and tells us that something that we did or said made him feel happy, we feel good. The problem arises when we start doing things for others in order for them to be happy and as time goes, we teach them to be dependent on us for their happiness. As they feel dependent on us for their happiness, their demands keep increasing and we keep giving even though we start feeling depleted. We have done two things – we have taught them to depend on us (rather than the power of their focus) and we have started resenting the very relationships we may have wanted to be of value to because now we feel we cannot give anymore. When we tell others that we cannot give anymore, more often than not they may react with anger because they are now used to getting their happiness from us. We may want them to have a different reaction. We may want them to understand where we are coming from but more often than not, this is not what we get from them in this situation.
We can’t control others (we may try and maybe we succeed with one person in the world but we can’t control them all and we do meet many people during our lifetime… trying to control them results in frustration) but we can control our thoughts. When we decide to focus on positive feeling thoughts, we allow the law of attraction to match us more with experiences which make us feel even more positive. As we practice our positive feeling thoughts throughout the day, every day, those who are around us either change to be a match to our new and improved vibrations or leave our experience and others take their place who are a match to our new vibrations. We start allowing the life experiences we desire.
Yes, it does require practice and initially, it may require gently guiding yourself to positive feeling thoughts. Feeling positive is not like a college degree that once you have it, it’s yours forever. Feeling positive is a choice you make every day, throughout the day. The suggestion is to be kind and gentle with yourself when starting to choose positive feeling thoughts over negative feeling thoughts. If you find yourself thinking negative feeling thoughts, that’s okay. You are human. The moment you are aware that you are thinking negative feeling thoughts, if you want, you can change them by distracting yourself to positive feeling thoughts. You can change your thoughts whenever you want. You never miss the bus.
Distracting yourself to “topics which are easy for you to appreciate” makes allowing more and more positive feeling moments easier on a daily basis. When you do this, that’s when you start allowing the life that you want to live – predominantly and consistently feeling positive. Anything that you want – more money, good health, a more nurturing relationship, a better career, starting a new venture, a bigger car etc. is all because you believe that you will feel better in the having of it. It is that feeling that you are targeting through that physical manifestation. If you can feel positive even though what you want has not yet manifested, what you want manifests “easily” in all its glory and the best part is that you “enjoy” the journey to living the physical manifestation that you want. That’s when you are “in the flow”. Athletes call it being in the zone. Musicians, athletes, authors, inventors, composers etc have long realized that unless they are in the flow, nothing flows.
Don’t do it for others. Do it for yourself. You can easily reconnect to your power, which was, is and always will be there for you within you.
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Photo credit – Neal Kharawala via unsplash.com