Stop Looking For It

Whatever it is you seek in this life….

Whether love, happiness, peace, money, joy, respect, knowledge, wisdom….

At a time in your life, release yourself from the deep yearning to have this for yourself….

Allow yourself to experiment, to see that perhaps in stopping the act of searching for it, and in halting the desire for it, it will come on its own….

The desire to make it happen may have actually been holding you back, interfering with your progress….

In my life….

I have said to myself….

To heck with it, if she doesn’t like me, she doesn’t like me….

(After dealing with crippling social anxiety.)

Then she liked me….

I have said, if I stop reading and I become ignorant and foolish, then so be it….

(It’s not that I don’t read, but I am willing to go through periods where I don’t read anything.)

Then I became wiser….

I have said, if I am unable to be tranquil because of a chaotic environment and situation (out of my control), then oh well….

And I found peace through the storms, even practicing meditation/mindfulness through them at times….

I have said if I invest in this thing I believe in, and it fails miserably, then at least I did something I believe in….

Many of those investments (in my own book projects, for example) did fail, economically speaking, but enough succeeded and they carried me forward into a deeper journey of learning, growing, and writing….

Over and over, I found that in releasing myself from the desire for an expectation, the desired expectation came true anyway, often right after I gave up on it.

As a chess player, one of the best things you can do in a losing position is to say to yourself “Okay, I am utterly defeated.” As soon as you truly accept that defeat, you open yourself to strange, threatening problems to pose your opponent.

There is magic in that moment where you see the futility and stare straight into it.

You accept defeat for a moment, but then you press on, never truly giving up. Even if there is one window of opportunity, that is all you need.

True awareness is where you find that thing you were searching for….

You come to understand that “I will never find this love – it is simply beyond me, but one day, maybe it will find me, if I keep on doing what I know I must do in this life….”

You give up, but just temporarily.

Then somehow, people in your life come to sense your newfound inner-worth, because you know you no longer need anyone else, and they become attracted to you.

More importantly, your love for yourself will finally have grown, as you stopped measuring your life by whether another person loved you….

Here is another example….

A few years ago, I developed tinnitus (ringing in one ear), and at a certain point, it was bad enough that I actually didn’t know how I would be able to focus again, with this loud, annoying, constant piercing sound in my ear. I had developed regular headaches, and it was a miserable experience.

But at a certain point, I accepted defeat, rather than searching for what to do about it.

I stopped looking for the feeling of relief from the tinnitus. I stopped hoping for it to go away.

I told myself that this tinnitus ringing sound isn’t even there. My brain is producing the noise (I believe this is actually true, medically speaking). This sound isn’t important. It’s nonexistent. I will go about my life like always. And I did.

And soon enough after that, the “sound” eased off. I barely noticed it anymore. I’m not sure if it actually got better, if I simply stopped noticing it, or both.

Strangely, in giving up on looking for any relief or solutions, it mostly went away. Now, it is quite mild and doesn’t affect my life.

(Of course, the one thing I did and continue to do, is protect my ears from loud noises, but that does not make the tinnitus go away.)

Understand this….

Typically, our life problems are self-created, working in cycles, over and over. And we exhaust ourselves simply to repeat them….

The desire to escape the pain or troubles, somehow actually manifests them, over and over.

If you truly inspect your life and see it for what it is, you are likely to find that you must do something different.

You must actually stop wanting that thing that you think you want, in order to get it.

And if you don’t get it, you may find that your life blossoms in other ways that you never could have guessed.

Of course, if you had a goal, you went directly for it, and you achieved it, then you are done. There is nothing else to do….

But I am speaking to those who have spent themselves totally, drained their life’s energy for a pursuit, only to have it escape them, perhaps over and over….

What else is there to do?

Accept defeat, even if just for now….

What is the worst that could happen?

Abandon the goal, or if not, at least abandon the hope that it will turn out in a certain way.

Let it go.

Find freedom there, in not needing everything to happen in a particular way.

Allow yourself to play with this life, to explore and see where it goes, rather than needing something from it.

Perhaps you can have love, happiness, peace, money, joy, respect, knowledge, or wisdom, just not in the way you had expected to find it….

Stop Looking

But still be there, present, aware, ready for when what you desire arises on its own….

Ready for when the ingredients to make it happen all line up for you….

Give it a month….

You’ve spent years or decades trying to get there….

If it didn’t happen, give yourself a month of not looking. Give it an honest try.

Get back into a hobby, play a musical instrument, get in touch with old friends, write a book, or whatever keeps your mind off of this so-called goal.

See how it goes.

Let me know….

The Heaviness of Thoughts

Today, I am light in my thoughts in that I am not particularly preoccupied with any given thought. And this is a privilege, for it means that my needs are taken care of for the day. If they were not taken care of, of course, perhaps I would be thinking of that more. And those thoughts would weigh on me heavily.

However, many people who have their needs taken care of still deal with endless, unhelpful thoughts. Often, we invite a lot of this heaviness in. For example, with the news, media, commercials, nonsense discussions, toxic individuals, and on and on. We open not just our ears and eyes to this useless information, but we open our minds to it, and it becomes a virus that infects us.

An issue with many of our thoughts is that they become giant monuments that we carry on our shoulders. All the thoughts you have ever had or been exposed to are like a giant statue you must carry with you everywhere you go. And the strange thing is that we stop realizing that we carry these with us. We think they are a part of us, but perhaps they are not. Maybe we have chosen to carry them around.

You carry these ideas and add new ones every day, and so every day, you become more sluggish, thinking that you know more but actually know less. In thinking we have accumulated facts and information, we believe ourselves to be smarter, more knowledgeable, or wiser, but we rarely are. What grows more than our knowledge is our mental anguish, as we invite the mental virus to infect us.

And so sometimes, there is nothing wrong with forgetting it all and retreating to a mental space of quiet.

But how do we get there? To tell you to meditate (or exercise or do yoga, etc.) may be futile. Either you do meditate, or you don’t. Either you know how to quiet the mind, or you don’t. Either you are conditioned to attend to thoughts and magnify their importance and obsess over them, or you are not.

It’s not that these patterns are unchangeable, but this change takes commitment, and it takes an awareness that the thoughts may have just led to self-poisoning rather than to clarity and knowing.

Clarity is in the thoughtlessness, where we are not dealing with cobwebs in the mind. You can attend to the few worthy thoughts when you clear those cobwebs. And there are just a few.

Most thoughts are draining, not resolving anything, not leading anywhere, so I have learned to let them go.

Yet, to claim that letting go of thoughts leads to pure bliss or happiness is false.

Aiming for clarity and wishing to reduce unnecessary thoughts can also be exhausting. I find that for every 100 thoughts, either the rethinking of old views I’ve had or being exposed to new information that leads to certain thoughts, over 99% lead nowhere. Yet, I still prefer to move away from those thoughts, rather than to absorb them and concern myself with them.

Think of it. Whether you’ve had one thought per day or a million, what is the difference in the end? I would pity the person who had a million of them and revere the one who only had a single thought, as long as that single thought had been worthy.

Ultimately, we must choose the thoughts that can lift us up.

---

If you enjoyed this post and want to learn some of the worthy Thoughts, you may wish to read 7 Thoughts to Live Your Life By: A Guide to the Happy, Peaceful, & Meaningful Life. (on Amazon and other major retailers).