Oakville Zen Meditation
Why it is so hard to stay happy all the time?
It is a fact: all of us are experiencing mood swings up down, up down, all the time. There are many obvious reasons to be down and depressed such as when a disaster is striking but our mind can be moody even without obvious reasons. For example:
Sometimes we wake up in good spirit, sometime we feel gloomy and down without any specific triggers.
Why that?
Beside the powerful hidden impacts of our subconscious mind on our swinging mood, our emotional ups and downs is probably one of the best tools used by our conscious mind to control us since emotions, especially the negative ones, are attracting our attention like light is attracting bugs at night.
As soon we are caught with an emotion, it is hard to let it go and move on something else, especially when such emotion is a negative one such as anger, regret, worry or resentment. Negative emotions are like
powerful magnet attracting all our attention.
Zen teaching and the practice of mindfulness meditation are helping us to deal effectively with these magnetic traps. The 3-dteps tool includes: mindful awareness+ acceptance+ letting go.
We talk about this approach many times already.
On the other hand, positive emotions such as happiness and joy never last as long as the negative ones. They evaporate too fast to leave room to the worries and others doom and glooms.
Too bad but this is how the ego-mind enjoys the ride.
Some of the main reasons why ongoing happiness or better serenity is almost impossible.
1)Maybe, as we said, it is because we are attracted to our negative thoughts rather than the positive ones, seeing the glass half empty.
2) Maybe because we refuse to accept then let go of the things that make us sad, angry, jealous, resentful, worried, etc... Accepting is perceived as a failure but it is not. It is a tool to remove the emotional aspect of the feeling. Fighting and resisting increase the pain and the dependence on the emotion.
Accepting is also critical when there no obvious solutions. It is only after accepting that a rational, pragmatic and non-emotional approach can be considered.
3) Maybe because we are living too much in the past & future, regretting the former
and worrying / expecting too much about the later.
4) Maybe because we do not realize that absolutely everything is transient.
5) Maybe because we want to control everything and we realize we cannot..
6) Maybe because disaster for self or loved ones such as accidents & diseases are striking too often.
7) Maybe the reasons are deep inside our subconscious mind and we don’t have access to them.
8) Maybe because we are stuck too much in our mind-set made of thinking, belief, judgment and others.
9) Above all:
Maybe because we don't realize that each new second, minute, hour and day regardless its content is a gift of life coming from somewhere.
