subject: The Flow is, and Practice Makes You Dance In It [print this page] The Flow is, and Practice Makes You Dance In It
Since the time a person is born he is directly or indirectly mislead by the society that if he whines and moans about things that bother him, the problem will eventually go away. As a baby, the person realizes that if he is lonely, hungry, angry or sad all he needs to do is cry and mommy and daddy will solve all their problems.
Although it is true that the helpless baby's momentary anguish will be taken care of by mommy and daddy, he also learns from this behavior that by whining about anything that bothers him, the problems will eventually go away. When the parents give the baby whatever he desires to calm him down, they don't realize that they are doing damage to the baby's future personality. Instead of succumbing to a child's demands, it is best not to give in to his demands because this action will ultimately teach him not to take the world and people for granted. We have all at one point in our lives taken a person or a situation for granted and when the person or circumstances do not confirm to the way we'd like them to be, we whine and we throw temper tantrums all attitudes that were formed when we were little children.
To realize true happiness, one has to come to the conclusion that it is his desires that are the root cause of all his suffering, as confirmed by Hinduism and Buddhism. However, understating the nature of this suffering is not enough to be free of them. This is because even though we may understand something on an intellectual level, taking this lesson to heart and actually applying them to our life is not that easy for everyone. To make an analogy, an alcoholic may understand that his behavior is wrong; it takes a lot of effort into actually giving up the addiction. Similarly, when we lose someone that we love, we know that the best thing we could do is to let go, and move on with our lives. However, it is not that easy to let go of our hopes, desires and expectations of what we want. Once we make that emotional investment, we expect some kind of return and giving this up is not easy.
Self-control is when we can recognize the moment, and if weakness and desires exists within it, to not let them determine our actions that follow that moment. When the alcoholic recognizes his craving for alcohol, and resists that temptation for a drink, he is not letting his desires control him, and thus frees himself of the moment. Likewise, if whenever we have emotional turmoil in our lives, we have to analyze our feelings and desires, and filter out those thoughts we know will cause us to act not in the best interest for our lives.
Of course, this may be easier said than done for some people. To gain control of our thoughts, we need practice. One of the best ways this can be done would be with meditation. For the beginner, the best practice is breathing exercises. We have to look at how we inhale and exhale: See how you breathe in and feel how you breathe out. Once we gain mastery over this simple technique, we can move on to more advanced stages, and learn to understand our nature further.
Understanding ourselves is the first step to controlling the flow that is around, and ultimately our lives.
