Life is not happening to you – life is happening for you. This is a powerful shift in our attitude.
This morning, the topic of my meditation was highly relevant to our times.
On resilience.
The guide narrated a story that was simple yet thought provoking – one I have recounted below.
Given than most of us have been stuck at home for more than 6 months now, this is highly pertinent a topic towards managing our mental health.
I have been focusing on the concept of ‘reinventing oneself during the pandemic’ in my daily journal – for that gives me a purpose to be.
The below story thus resonated well with me and I hope it does with you too.
There is a young lady and she is having many kinds of challenges in her life. She comes to her mother to complain about it. Her mother just smiles and leads her to the kitchen. She puts three pots of water and starts boiling them and her daughter is wondering what’s going on. In one she puts carrots, in another she adds eggs and in the third she adds coffee beans.
And as the water comes to a boil, she removes each of those three vessels and as it cools down she asks her daughter to examine the three vessels. The daughter finds that the carrots have become very soft, the eggs have become quite hard and the water with the coffee has gotten colored. She turns and asks her mother, ‘ What is this. What are you trying to teach me?’
The mother smiles and says, ‘the carrots went in really hard and strong and came out quite soft. The eggs went in quite fragile and came out pretty hard. The coffee beans look pretty much the same but the water has been completely transformed.
So life is like this. All those three – the carrot, the eggs and the coffee beans faced the same adversity – boiling water. And yet the response is quite different. So as the challenges come in our life, how are we going to respond?
Are we going to go in hard and then become all disheartened and soft?
Are we going to go in very open-hearted and then become hard-hearted. Outwardly looking the same but inwardly very brittle.
Or are we going to be like the coffee bean – when the adversity comes, the situations themselves get transformed.
So learn how to activate the coffee bean attitude within us – the beautiful skill of resilience.
The idea, the guide points out, is that “What we resist in life, will persist. Whatever we welcome, it is not a problem anymore”
Suffering is any experience multiplied by resistance and happiness is any experience multiplied by acceptance.
Life is not happening to you – life is happening for you.
This is a powerful shift in our attitude. Whatever comes up you say, ‘bring it on’.
Bring it On.