Читать книгу Secrets About Life Every Woman Should Know: Ten principles for spiritual and emotional fulfillment - Barbara Angelis De - Страница 5

The most auspicious moment of your life is when you make the commitment to know the Truth, a commitment so firm there is no turning back.

GURUMAYI CHIDVILASANANDA

Imagine a life in which you woke up every morning excited about the day ahead and certain that, when you went to sleep at night, you would be able to say, “This was a great day!” …

Imagine knowing that no matter what challenges you faced in your relationships, your work, or your family, you would always remain centered, calm, and clear …

Imagine having a source of confidence and wisdom inside yourself that you could count on to be a constant wellspring of strength and inspiration …

Imagine what it would be like if you knew exactly what you needed to do to make each and every moment of your life one of great happiness, great contentment, and great peace …

The experiences I describe here aren’t simply impossible dreams—they are possible, very attainable realities. They paint a picture of a life that, perhaps, has only existed as a dream you’re sure could never come true. But it can. I wrote this book to help you create that kind of life for yourself, a life that feels like it is working, like it makes sense, and, most importantly, a life in which you are living and loving as the powerful, fulfilled person you’ve always wanted to be.

This book is about something every one of us seeks in our heart—true freedom, inner freedom, the kind that saints and mystics have written about throughout the ages. This kind of freedom is not the freedom to acquire more of what you can eventually lose, or to experience more of what will eventually change, or to do more of what will eventually not matter. Instead, it’s the freedom that comes from knowing how to discover your own state of joy and contentment and protect it from all of life’s ups and downs. It’s the freedom that comes from knowing how to build a center of emotional and spiritual self-reliance on the inside, a center that will allow you to live every day with greater joy, greater strength, and greater peace. Most of all, it’s the freedom that comes from finding a source of security and happiness inside yourself, happiness that nothing and no one can ever take away from you.

Ever since I can remember, I have been a seeker of this inner freedom. I’ve been on a conscious and committed journey trying to discover the truths about life that would help me make sense of my existence and get the most out of my time here on earth. At the age of eighteen, I found my first spiritual guide and since then, I’ve had the privilege of studying with many great and revered teachers and immersing myself in the knowledge and practices of the world’s most ancient spiritual traditions.

Secrets About Life Every Woman Should Know contains the most important lessons about life that I have learned during my own profoundly transformative emotional and spiritual odyssey of the last thirty years. And even though the information in this book has been growing patiently and persistently inside of me for all this time, I couldn’t have written it ten years ago, five years ago, even two years ago. Like a soup that you know still needs to simmer just a little bit more, this book needed these last twenty-four months of my life to add the final flavor. Now it’s ready, and it is my privilege and great joy to be able to offer it to you.

All of us spend our lives searching, consciously or unconsciously, for lasting fulfillment. We make hundreds of decisions every day, from what to eat for breakfast to what CD to listen to in the car to how hard to work on a project to whom we fall in love with, based on what we think will make us happier, what will create a greater sense of security, what will provide us with more of the things we tell ourselves we need to feel successful and complete. Most of these decisions are an attempt to master, or at least cope with, the outer world. This is where we put our energies—trying to get what we want and keep everything under control.

In spite of our best efforts, in spite of how hard we try to get everything to turn out the way we want it to, a strange things happens: our hopes and dreams keep bumping into reality. We have a picture of how we always thought our lives should be, but if we are really honest with ourselves, we have to admit that our lives look very different from that picture. And so we suffer, because what is happening is different from what we think should be happening, because we are feeling something different from what we think we should be feeling. Reality lets us down, not just once, but over and over again.

At some point in our lives, usually by the time we reach our thirties or forties, we face the difficult realization that no matter what we acquire or achieve, we can’t completely control what happens on the outside. This conclusion often fills our hearts with a deep sensation of emotional and spiritual uneasiness, and haunts our minds with challenging and perhaps disturbing questions: What is the purpose of my life? What am I supposed to be doing here? Why is it so difficult for me to experience true happiness, true inner peace?

Have you ever seen one of those circus acts where someone has ten or twelve china plates spinning on top of thin sticks? The performer comes out and starts a few plates spinning and then adds a few more and a few more, until, hopefully, all his plates are spinning at once. At least, that’s the idea. We all know what happens—just when he has the plates at one end of the table spinning right, a plate at the other end starts to wobble, so he runs down and gets it going faster. Suddenly, two plates in the middle look like they are about to topple off, and as soon as he sets them right, two others in separate spots are on the verge of crashing down. Back and forth he frantically races, the audience laughing with delight and cheering him on if he gets all of his plates to spin properly without disaster.

Why do we find this feat so fascinating? Why do we shriek with a kind of perverse delight when a plate drops? Because this display mirrors our own lives perfectly. The truth is, most of us live just like this. We have all these “plates”—our relationship plate, our work plate, our family plate, our money plate, our health plate, and so many others—and our goal is to keep them all spinning at once. You know what you did first this morning when you woke up? You mentally checked your plates!! “O.K., the relationship plate … well, things with my husband are pretty good. How about the kids plate? Hmm … a little shaky.… Jennifer is having trouble in school but it’s not that bad yet. Let me look at this work plate. OH NO! It’s wobbling pretty badly—I am really behind on that project at the office, and look down there at the money plate … Oh gosh, our credit card bills are way too high this month, that plate’s about to crash …”

And so you spend the rest of the day running around trying to get the shaky plates stabilized, and hoping that too many plates don’t start to fall at once. Your idea of a “good day” is when all of your plates are spinning, no mishaps. And a bad day? Well, we all know what that’s like: it seems like some devious, invisible hand is knocking one plate after another off the sticks, and no matter how hard you try, you just can’t keep them up in the air where they belong.

This is the battle you face each day, the battle for control of your life. You have your picture of how things “should” be, how your relationship “should” feel, how much money you “should” be earning, how your kids “should” behave, how people “should” treat you fairly, how it all “should” turn out. And when something happens that doesn’t fit this picture, which it inevitably does, you feel like something is going “wrong”; you feel out of control. One of your plates has dropped. You may have been happy ten minutes before, but suddenly you’re angry, or frightened, or depressed. You have lost your state of equanimity.

Like most people, I spent much of my life collecting what I thought were beautiful “plates”—the perfect career, the perfect relationship, the perfect home—then trying desperately to keep them all spinning, and praying none of them would crash to the floor. And of course I failed, because as we’ll see later on, part of the purpose of life is for those plates to fall, and for us to learn the lessons that inevitably come when we are staring at the pieces of our egos scattered all over the ground. For me, each time a plate toppled over, I would feel as if somehow I’d done something wrong, and my inner state of peace and contentment would be shaken. “If only I can get all my plates to stay up,” I would tell myself, “then I would finally be happy.”

It was my own fervent spiritual search for the truth that ultimately led me to a series of profound realizations. For over twenty years, I’d been teaching and writing about how to create loving relationships with the people in your life. There are emotional principles, I would explain, that make love work or not work, and if you take the time to learn about these principles, you will be able to experience more intimacy, more connection, more fulfillment. Eventually, I reached an even deeper level of understanding: the most important relationship I have, that we all have, is with life itself. I had patterns of relating to life—accepting it or resisting it, surrendering to it or misunderstanding it, approaching it courageously or approaching it fearfully, paying attention or ignoring its messages, being grateful for it or not appreciating its gifts—just as I had patterns in my human relationships. How I chose to interpret events that happened to me, the attitude I brought to each day when I woke up in the morning, the way I responded to difficulty, how much I listened to what my life was trying to tell me, all these habits were determining the quality of my relationship with life. And my relationship with life was affecting my relationship with everything else. It all started inside of me.

I knew the principles that made relationships work. I knew the principles that made communication work between two people. So what were the principles that could make my relationship with life work?