LOA Daily - Is Your Happiness Dependent Upon Other Peoples' Thoughts?

Is Your Happiness Dependent Upon Other Peoples' Thoughts?

Walt shares something he posted in a Facebook group today, and Alyx
gives her reactions.

Here is the text:

My happiness IS NOT dependent upon YOUR thoughts, feelings, or behaviors.

My happiness IS dependent upon MY thoughts, feelings, or behaviors.

These truths seem so obvious, don’t they! And yet, it’s absolutely
amazing how often we forget them.

In personal relationships, many of us forget them every day. How many
times yesterday did you wish that someone else would behave differently
toward you so that you could feel better?

We also forget about them in work relationships. How often do we get all
worked up when a coworker behaves in a way toward us that we don’t like?
And yet, in getting all worked up, we make our happiness dependent upon
them.

Discussions often have the same issue. Yesterday’s discussion about a
removed post was a case in point. Some people declared that their
happiness was dependent upon whether other people discussed a particular
topic.

This phenomenon also happens all of the time in the world of politics.
Liberals, for instance, get all worked up about how horrible climate
change is and how everyone has a moral duty to join the struggle against
climate change. Similarly conservatives, in another instance, get all
worked up about how horrible gay marriage is and how everyone has a
moral duty to join the struggle against gay marriage.

In both cases, whether liberal or conservative, people get themselves
into a state about how other people think, feel, and behave. And in
doing so, they give away their own power. They abandon their own, core
strength.

And we wonder why it is we get more of the thing we oppose! Climate
change campaigners find themselves with more and more instances of
climate change every day. Gay marriage bashers find themselves more and
more confronted with gay relationships every day.

But what would happen if we took what a good friend of mine calls
“radical responsibility” for our own happiness? What would happen if we
decided that our happiness was solely dependent upon our own thoughts,
feelings, and behaviors?

When someone we’re close to behaves in a way we don’t like, instead of
pushing back at the behavior we don’t like, what would happen if we were
to emphasize the behavior that we do like? What if we chose to only
respond with what we do like without any worry about what they like and
without trying in any way to change or challenge what they like?

What would happen is that we’d be much, much happier.

When the coworker says something we don’t like, instead of responding to
it by pushing back at it, we could choose a different response that
essentially emphasizes what we like instead. And we could openly take
ownership of the fact that we like it and that we don’t expect others to
like the same thing in order for us to be happy with it. Wouldn’t that
be radical!

It wouldn’t just be radical. It would be a much higher vibration.

What would happen if the liberal, instead of focusing on what he doesn’t
like about climate change, focused instead on the fact that he likes
clean air, clean water, electric cars, and all of the good-feeling stuff
that he prefers?

What would happen is that the world’s vibration would rise.

And what would happen if the conservative, instead of focusing on what
he doesn’t like about gay marriage, focused instead on what he likes
about heterosexual marriage and heterosexual relationships?

What would happen is that more people would embrace the philosophy,
“Live and let live.”

There is a great gift in the idea that our happiness is dependent upon
our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and that in fact our
happiness has no dependence at all upon the thoughts, feelings, or
behaviors of others. It is a gift of peace in one’s own life. It is a
gift of releasing resistance. It is a gift of feeling GOOD!

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