Shortcuts to Happiness. Part xviii

In my experience I realize that we not only give over our opinions on every subject, but we have learned to judge from a particular stand point. We have become very clever at pinpointing all that’s difficult and bad in our lives and in the world around us. The media reflects and reinforces this bias. The reward is continual stress, discomfort and anxiety. We set ourselves up for unhappiness rather than for peace and comfort.

We spend most of our lives judging, but by making these very judgments because we want to distinguish between “good and bad” “right and wrong” “possible or impossible” in order to help us make decisions and choose behaviors we are distancing ourselves from creating new possibilities in our lives. Instead we get stuck in our very own conclusions, our judgments keeping us in our unhappiness.

For example someone might declare his/her love for us. Immediately, we ask ourselves “is this persons’ declaration of love, caring and intimacy good or bad for me”? One possible answer this is ‘good’ (the judgment) now I can feel valued (the feeling) and we can get married (the action). Or the alternative might be this is ‘bad’ for me (the judgment) because I will now feel pressured (the feeling) to commit more time and energy to this relationship so I better leave to preserve my freedom (the action).

Very simply the stimulus, in this case, (the declaration of love) does not create happiness or unhappiness; the stimulus just is! How we judge it determines how we feel and how we act. If we judge a circumstance to be good (not only for us, but for those we love and for humanity) we feel excited, happy, fulfilled and tend to support or move toward the experience. If we judge it as bad, then we feel duly angry, fearful, anxious or sad and tend to move away from the experience.

As human beings we have demonstrated an uncanny ability to turn any set of circumstances into an opportunity to be uncomfortable or unhappy. Unwittingly, we have been misled by a culture that has taught us systematically to use discomfort at almost every juncture as the best way to take care of ourselves.
Frequently we view ourselves as responders to or victims of situations rather than the authors of our experiences.

As a result we can easily loose our way and become confused with our entire thinking process, condemning it erroneously for robbing us of inner peace and tranquility. In contrast we can be grateful for our skills and talents and use them for our benefit. We can in fact use our capabilities to create beliefs and make judgments as a tool for our own personal liberation from discomfort.