Is there such a thing as ‘Hindu terrorism’, as the arrest of Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur for the recent Malegaon blasts may tend to prove? Well, I guess I was asked to write this column because I am one of that rare breed of foreign correspondents—a lover of Hindus! A born Frenchman, Catholic-educated and non-Hindu, I do hope I’ll be given some credit for my opinions, which are not the product of my parents’ ideas, my education or my atavism, but garnered from 25 years of reporting in South Asia (for Le Journal de Geneve and Le Figaro).

In the early 1980s, when I started freelancing in south India, doing photo features on kalaripayattu, the Ayyappa festival, or the Ayyanars, I slowly realised that the genius of this country lies in its Hindu ethos, in the true spirituality behind Hinduism. The average Hindu you meet in a million villages possesses this simple, innate spirituality and accepts your diversity, whether you are Christian or Muslim, Jain or Arab, French or Chinese. It is this Hinduness that makes the Indian Christian different from, say, a French Christian, or the Indian Muslim unlike a Saudi Muslim.

I also learnt that Hindus not only believed that the divine could manifest itself at different times, under different names, using different scriptures (not to mention the wonderful avatar concept, the perfect answer to 21st century religious strife) but that they had also given refuge to persecuted minorities from across the world—Syrian Christians, Parsis, Jews, Armenians, and today, Tibetans. In 3,500 years of existence, Hindus have never militarily invaded another country, never tried to impose their religion on others by force or induced conversions.

You cannot find anybody less fundamentalist than a Hindu in the world and it saddens me when I see the Indian and western press equating terrorist groups like simi, which blow up innocent civilians, with ordinary, angry Hindus who burn churches without killing anybody. We know also that most of these communal incidents often involve persons from the same groups—often Dalits and tribals—some of who have converted to Christianity and others not.
However reprehensible the destruction of Babri Masjid, no Muslim was killed in the process; compare this to the ‘vengeance’ bombings of 1993 in Bombay, which wiped out hundreds of innocents, mostly Hindus. Yet the Babri Masjid destruction is often described by journalists as the more horrible act of the two. We also remember how Sharad Pawar, when he was chief minister of Maharashtra in 1993, lied about a bomb that was supposed to have gone off in a Muslim locality of Bombay.

I have never been politically correct, but have always written what I have discovered while reporting. Let me then be straightforward about this so-called Hindu terror. Hindus, since the first Arab invasions, have been at the receiving end of terrorism, whether it was by Timur, who killed 1,00,000 Hindus in a single day in 1399, or by the Portuguese Inquisition which crucified Brahmins in Goa. Today, Hindus are still being targeted: there were one million Hindus in the Kashmir valley in 1900; only a few hundred remain, the rest having fled in terror. Blasts after blasts have killed hundreds of innocent Hindus all over India in the last four years. Hindus, the overwhelming majority community of this country, are being made fun of, are despised, are deprived of the most basic facilities for one of their most sacred pilgrimages in Amarnath while their government heavily sponsors the Haj.
They see their brothers and sisters converted to Christianity through inducements and financial traps, see a harmless 84-year-old swami and a sadhvi brutally murdered. Their gods are blasphemed.

So sometimes, enough is enough.At some point, after years or even centuries of submitting like sheep to slaughter, Hindus—whom the Mahatma once gently called cowards—erupt in uncontrolled fury. And it hurts badly. It happened in Gujarat. It happened in Jammu, then in Kandhamal, Mangalore, and Malegaon. It may happen again elsewhere. What should be understood is that this is a spontaneous revolution on the ground, by ordinary Hindus, without any planning from the political leadership. Therefore, the BJP, instead of acting embarrassed, should not disown those who choose other means to let their anguished voices be heard.

There are about a billion Hindus, one in every six persons on this planet. They form one of the most successful, law-abiding and integrated communities in the world today. Can you call them terrorists?

Source :: Rediff Blogs

You can tend to your busy life later, but from time to time stop and just BE

Make no mistake about it, change is challenging whether it is conscious or unexpected. Viewing adversity as change, not loss or failure, is part of empowered and positive thinking.
Humans develop resiliency through change, both physiologically, and emotionally. It’s necessary for all life forms to evolve. Change comes though many vehicles — some hit us hard, others
are rather sneaky. But despite the challenges change brings, we know it is our natural state — the world grows and we grow with it fueled by our emotions.
We are already designed to cry, express sorrow, frustration, anger, and resentment and most of us choose to explore these feelings. But we are also designed to have hope, recover, be stronger, and inspire others as a result of change. You are never alone because emotion gives us plenty in common — as a society, we are not yet Vulcans. What makes one person triumphantly survive loss and turn it into positive energy, while another in similar circumstances resign? It has to do with our underlying assumptions on change.
I have two very dear friends; each has had a double mastectomy from breast cancer. Losing body parts is devastating, not to mention living with the daily uncertainty of not knowing whether you continue to remain in remission. Yet one woman has forged ahead as a life-force warrior, focusing on triumphs and wins of today. She doesn’t look back.
The other has difficulty moving forward — not engaging in work outside her home, quitting her job, waiting for something to happen while in a state of self-imposed limbo. They’ve processed their information in completely different ways. Why? It’s because people want certainty before they decide to accept change. It’s a natural reaction.
Certainly our culture has become more comfortable with making choices that have predictable outcomes. A current cultural disease we suffer from is predictability, reflected in our inability to accept change at a deeply personal level.
It applies across the board to choices we make with our finances, careers, or our relationships. Science, especially when applied to health issues, has given us a false security blanket when it comes to certainty. After all, it seems we’ve been able to control nature. We like to think we’ve cornered the market on predictability and good planning, when the truth is we live in a time where prediction is more intuition and common sense than science.
To embrace change, we need to release the umbilical cord we think we have to outcomes of certainty. In other words, stepping off of the plateau requires a huge amount of trust. Your fall will be broken somewhere at the right time.
Believing that is what allows us to cope. It is the first step, unsupported by any scientific doctrine. And it’s a big one. No matter what science pronounces, whether it is in the form of a diagnosis or the state of the environment, there is no sure thing. Science has already given us permission to accept truth with a margin of error in just about anything. There is always the possibility something may exist or not exist, despite what patterns indicate.
Truly, it is a useless endeavour to let science hold you back from moving forward. Whether it is health, or other issues surrounding job loss, divorce, or death, you will s u c c e s s f u l ly n av i g at e through change and elevate the quality of your life by knowing anyone can beat the odds.
A l m o s t everyone you know has a story of beating the odds. Let’s pay attention to the real evidence instead of looking for ways to prove that we cannot make it or the odds are just too great. Adopting a new attitude on adversity requires big picture thinking on the subject of change. View life, and spiritual development for that matter, as an upward spiral where you experience some of the same lessons over and over again.
Is it because we just aren’t getting what the lesson is telling us? Perhaps, but that’s not the only reason. We’ve deliberately put those circumstances in our chart in frequent doses to allow ourselves an opportunity to see how we’ve been progressing on the upward part of that growth spiral.
Adversity is an inescapable performance indicator — a frequent reminder of our upcoming 360-degree review in how we handle the bumps. We are meant to be stronger, more insightful each time we get walloped.

www.chakradhar.net

You can tend to your busy life later, but from time to time stop and just BE

Have you ever in your quest to be more and do more, experienced the feeling that you were going backward? We all seem to be over-stretching ourselves. I am always saying, “I never thought life would be this busy”. Could all this busyness actually prevent us or be creating blocks in our lives to what we are truly
seeking? Could we actually start slowing down and asking ourselves different questions that would end up creating a more profound awareness in our lives? Can this hectic life with so many distractions keep us from a life where we are in appreciation of each and every moment of our day?
We live in a world with so many expectations and so much to accomplish. Financial well-being, relationships that work, looking good and to be everything society wants us to be. All these burdens and expectations are like trying to push a bowling ball up a hill. Can we actually be causing damage to our well being, to the physical mind and body and in turn slowing the real growth we seek here on this planet?
Does this damage that we have possibly caused need to be healed and will we slow down enough to heal ourselves?
We pursue all these things to create a place of wholeness. We seek a life that is complete and whole and dream of enjoying all that life has to offer. But do we ever get to the place of peace, calmness, and serenity and do we ever find the love for our lives?
When will we start to
recognise that this is not working? And that we just keep doing more but the wholeness of our lives is just a big hole. Well, there is hope. When we start to recognise what is going on and pay attention, we can take steps in creating and changing our lives to make a difference.
When we recognise that we need to be responsible for our own life and that we are the ones who ultimately create our reality, we can actually break through all the expectations others have put on us and take the time to enjoy the moment. I am not saying that we just sit around and do nothing. The point that I am making is that we are so busy that we are never where we are in that moment. We are doing one task and thinking about the next task. We never take the time to be in the moment and enjoy the moment for just that. We are in our cars, talking on the phone and thinking about the meeting we have later that day.
We pick up a friend from the airport or we are at lunch with our mothers and we just have to answer that call from a friend who just wants to chit chat. When does it all slow down? When do we just be with someone or something? Like taking the time to read a book, or just sitting there and listening to your child, without all the noise going on in your head of what you have to do next? How about just being? Breathing and being in that moment from time to time and just enjoying it.
A good friend of mine would sometimes take a Friday afternoon off from work or her chores and just be with the day — enjoying the sunshine and feeling the warmth of the sun as it kisses her long flowing hair.
Do you ever slow down and listen to the birds sing, or watch a humming bird hover like a helicopter as it pecks at a bougainvillea? Do you still feel the coolness and that little tickle of the grass on your feet or are you just traversing this planet in pursuit of something you just cannot get your hands around?
Try breathing in and out slowly and feel the air move through your body. Do it now! Appreciate this moment and be in gratitude for this moment. Yes, you can tend to your busy life later, but from time to time stop and just BE.
Be open to seeing and feeling what is going on around you and really appreciate the moment for whatever it offers. Let the world take care of itself for a while. You don’t have to always fix everything.
As you get good at being in the moment you will learn how to do this even when you are busy. You can take on tasks and just be in that task. You can actually enjoy the task and do it so well that you don’t even realise how quickly time has passed and how efficient you were in accomplishing and enjoying that task. You can talk to someone and actually hear what they mean, not just what they are saying.
So pay attention to the moment for this moment will never appear again. Every moment is a precious gift and the decisions and things we do in every moment create our reality. Please enjoy this moment and every moment of your life.

www.chakradhar.net

You may not be who you think you are

Before we were born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human. First they told us what we are — a boy or a girl — then they told us who we are, and who we should or shouldn’t be. They taught us how to be a woman or how to be a man. They told us to be a proper woman, a decent woman, a strong man, a brave man. They gave us a name, and they told us the role we would play in their story. They prepared us to live in the human jungle, t o compete with one another, to impose our will, to fight against our own kind. They filled us with knowledge, and of course we believed them.
From the storytellers around us, we learned how to create our own story. By exploring the story that we create, I discovered that the story has a voice. You can call it ‘thinking’ if you want. I call it ‘the voice of knowledge’ because it’s telling you everything you know. It’s always trying to make sense out of everything. That voice is always there. It never stops. It’s not even real, but you hear it. You can say, ‘‘Well, it’s me. I’m the one who is talking.” But if you are the voice that is talking, then who is listening?
The voice of knowledge can also be called the liar who lives in your head. The liar speaks in your language, but your spirit, the truth, has no language. You just know truth; you feel it. The voice of your spirit tries to come out, but the voice of the liar is stronger and louder and it hooks your attention almost all of the time. You hear the voice, and what is it telling you? ‘‘Look at you. Who do you think you are? You will never make it. You aren’t smart enough. Why should I try? Nobody understands me. How can I be happy when millions of people are dying of starvation?”
That voice is usually lying because it’s the voice of what you have learned, and you have learned so many lies, mainly about yourself. The voice of knowledge can come from your own head, or it can come from people around you, but your emotional reaction to that voice is telling you, ‘‘I am being abused.”
Every time we judge ourselves, find ourselves guilty, and punish ourselves, it’s because the voice in our head is telling us lies. Every time we have a conflict with our parents, our children, or our beloved, it’s because we believe in lies, and they believe in them, too.
But it’s not just that. When we believe in lies, we cannot see the truth, so we make thousands of assumptions and we take them as truth. One of the biggest assumptions we make is that the lies we believe are the truth! For example, we believe that we know what we are. When we get angry we say, ‘‘Oh, that’s the way I am.” When we get jealous: ‘‘Oh, that’s the way I am.” But is this true? I am not sure about that.
I used to make the assumption that I was the one who said all those things that I didn’t want to say. It was a big surprise when I discovered that it was not me; it was the way I learned to be. And I practised and practised until I mastered that performance.
Two thousand years ago one of the greatest masters said, ‘‘And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Free from what? From the storyteller who lives in your head and talks to you all the time. When the voice in your head finally stops talking, you experience inner peace. If you follow two rules, all the lies that come from the voice of knowledge won’t survive your skepticism and will simply disappear.
Rule one: Don’t believe yourself. When you hear the voice in your head, don’t take it personally. You know that it’s usually lying to you. Lies can only survive if you believe them. If you don’t believe your own lies, you can make better choices based on truth.
Rule two: Don’t believe anybody else. When people talk, you have no idea if what they are saying is coming from their heart or from the liar who lives in their head. Listen because the communication can be wonderful.
You can change your life by refusing to believe your own lies. Start with the main lies that limit the expression of your happiness and your love. If you take your faith away from the lies, they lose their power over you. If you stop believing in lies, your whole life changes just like magic. You will be free of fear, drama, and conflict. This is the absolute truth.

www.chakradhar.net

My family raised beef cattle. Hundreds of cattle roamed the pastures of the 400-acre farm. When I was twelve my older brother was away in the army and my mother depended on me to look after the cattle. One fall day my mother noticed that a young heifer had just given birth to her first calf in a small yard next to the barn. Concerned about coyotes getting the calf, my mother asked me to herd the cow and calf into the barn for safety.
As I began to herd the cow she turned on me and all 1500 pounds of her began to charge. I was still near enough to the fence to easily retreat to safety. I was stunned. I had grown up with cows and had always been safe a ro u n d them. To be charged at, like that by a cow was a first.
The foll ow i n g spring my brother had re t u r n e d home and as the weather warmed I began my f avo u r i t e pastime of roaming the open fields of the farm. One day I was crossing the wide-open pasture behind the farm buildings. Roaming safely among the herd was something I had done all my life. So it was a shock to suddenly notice that one cow on the other side of the herd had begun to charge towards me. I was frozen in fear. It was the same cow that had charged at me in the barnyard the previous fall.
This time there was no fence close by, only open pasture in every direction. In the distance I heard the screen door of the farmhouse slam. Then my brother’s far away voice, yelling in the distance, ‘‘run at her, run at her!’’ My mind was a still impenetrable siren, but my thin little legs heard the message and began pounding on the new wet grass, carrying me directly at the cow. Suddenly she veered away and settled calmly into grazing again. I retreated as calmly as I could with a pounding heart and amazed to be physically in tact.
That summer and the following year, I continued roaming in open pastures and she continued charging at me. I also continued to respond by running at her with decreasing fear. Each time the distance between us diminished before she veered off to resume grazing. Until it just didn’t happen anymore.
That incident has stayed with me all my life. I continue to be amazed at my brother’s response to fear. ‘‘Run at her!’’ It was an act of intent to not be frightened by her. Running from her would have been sure defeat. She could have easily out run me and with something to chase she would have been
spurred on to over come me. In that experience my body-mind learned a profound lesson about how to meet fear.
What actually happened that day, that summer? What is fear? A feeling? An emotion? One of the things I have come to understand is that feeling is perception. Feeling is the perception of our energy ‘the energy’ that is the Creative Source of what is happening momentarily in our life and in life around us. That energy in any given moment has a particular quality. The nature of energy is to move, to transform. I perceive the quality of the energy in the moment by feeling it, by meeting it, by running at it.
An emotion is a particular feeling or perception of charged energy. The charge is caused by the energy not being able to move. A thought or a belief has become attached to the energy, holding it stuck unable to move or transform.
Thought and belief by their nature are always of the future or the past. It is hardly possible to be fully present now and think at the same time. Thoughts and beliefs are particularly active when emotion is present. Normally we tend to run away from emotion by simultaneous thinking, rerunning habituated thoughts and beliefs as strategies not to feel the emotion. This is like running from the cow. The emotion always continues to over take us for quite a while.
When we run at it, when we fully attend to the feeling, leaving no room to be aware of thoughts, beliefs, stories of the past, the future, then the energy of life is allowed to return to its natural flow towards transformation. Only full awareness feeling, free of thought can perceive the present, the quality of life energy and allow transformation.
This is the inner skill that was demonstrated to me back those many years in the pasture in my meeting with the cow. In that situation the outer events were a clear mirror or direct result of the inner reality. When I was running at the cow, there was no thought, only full awareness of feeling. Since I was fully focused on the feeling, the energy wasn’t held by thought or eventually even by belief. I was simply present. The energy was free to transform. Fear transformed to presence and finally to calmness.
Let go of the story and just feel. Give your whole being to perceiving the quality and intensity of the emotion. Be fully and completely present to it with full feeling. Give yourself a little time and silence to get accustomed to the feeling. Now that you are there fully embracing the feeling can you feel it begin to shift? Stay with the feeling as it moves, go deeper into the quality of it. You don’t need to put words to it just be present to it. Yet if you did name it, would it be more like still? Calm? Peace? Gentle? Emptiness? Love? Or not? Just allow whatever it is to be. Have you noticed that your cow has stopped charging?

www.chakradhar.net

This moving piece, currently in circulation on the Internet, proves that love is a lingua franca which does not need the spoken word

Michael and I did not know when the waiter put the plates on our table. We were sitting in a small restaurant, hidden from the busy Third Street, in New York City. Even the smell of a fresh serving of blintz did not interfere with our conversation. In fact, we let the blintz soak in the sour cream. We just enjoyed the conversation so much that we forgot to eat.

Our conversation was just so delightful, though we did not speak about important things. We were laughing and speaking about the movie which we had just watched the night before and arguing about the meaning of the morning’s literature seminar. He told me about his new-found maturity and step into adulthood, when he only responded if someone called him ‘Michael’ and pretended not to hear if they called him ‘Mikey’. Was that at the age 12 or 14? He did not remember, but he recalled his mother once cried and said that he had become a man too fast.

When we tasted the blueberry blintzes, I told him that my brother and I used to pick wild blueberries when visiting our cousins. I remembered I always finished my share before we went home and my aunt always warned me that I must be careful lest I have a stomach-ache. But, of course, no stomach-ache ever happened.

While our fun conversation continued, my eyes went across the room and stopped at the corner. An elderly couple was sitting there. The woman was wearing a flowery dress, the colour of which had faded over the years.

The top of the man’s head shined just like the boiled egg which he ate very slowly. The woman chewed her oatmeal very slowly too, seemingly with much effort.

But what made my mind think about about them was the silence around the two. The silence was so overpowering that it seemed like melancholy filled the corner completely. When our own conversation became a whisper, the silence of the old couple began to disturb me. How sad, I thought, if there is nothing to talk about at all? Were there any pages in each other’s life that they had not read? What if it happened to us?

Michael and I paid for our food and went on. When we passed the corner where the couple sat, my wallet fell. I stooped to pick it up, and stopped right there. For under the table, the old man was tenderly holding his wife’s hand. They were eating in silence while holding each other’s hand! I stood upright.

A feeling of utter delight filled my heart. Suddenly, I was touched to see the simple, yet very meaningful action reflecting the close relationship of the couple. And I felt special on being allowing to watch it.

The tender caress from the old man’s hand to his wife’s wrinkled and tired fingers, filled, not only what I though was an empty corner, but it filled my heart as well. I then realised that their silence was not the uncomfortable emptiness like what Michael and I used to have after the jokes we cracked on our first date. It was not that.

Their silence was pleasant and relaxing. It was the expression of the tender love which did not always need ‘the right words’ to express it.

They might have spent the hours like these so many times. Maybe this meal was no different from yesterday, but they enjoyed it in peace.

They accepted each other totally, with all their faults and follies. When Michael and I walked out of the restaurant, I thought maybe it was not bad at all if someday we shared something like the old couple. Maybe, it will become an expression of the tender and complete love we hope to share.

www.chakradhar.net

Atime comes in your life when you finally get it… When in the midst of all your fears and insanity you stop dead in your tracks and somewhere the voice inside your head cries out — ENOUGH!
Enough fighting and crying or struggling to hold on. And, like a child quieting down after a blind tantrum, your sobs begin to subside, you shudder once or twice, you blink back your tears and through a mantle of wet
lashes you begin to look at the world through new eyes. This is your awakening. You realise that it’s time to stop hoping and waiting for something to change or for happiness, safety and security to come galloping over the next horizon.
You come to terms with the fact that he is not Prince Charming and you are not Cinderella and that in the real world there aren’t always fairy tale endings (or beginnings for that matter) and that any guarantee of happily ever after must begin with you and in the process a sense of serenity is born of acceptance.
You awaken to the fact that you are not perfect and that not everyone will always love, appreciate or approve of who or what you are… and that’s OK. And you learn the importance of loving and championing yourself and in the process a sense of new found confidence is born of self-approval.
You stop judging and pointing fingers and you begin to accept people as they are and to overlook their shortcomings and human frailties and in the process a sense of peace and contentment is born of forgiveness. You realise that much of the way you view yourself, and the world around you, is as a result of all the messages and opinions that have been ingrained into your psyche. And you begin to sift through all the crap you’ve been fed about how you should behave, how you should look and how much you
should weigh what you should wear and where you should shop and what you should drive how and where you should live and what you should do for a living, who you should sleep with, who you should marry and what you should expect of a marriage, the importance of having and raising children or what you owe your parents.
You learn to open up to new worlds and different points of view. And you begin reassessing and redefining who you are, what you really stand for. You learn the difference between wanting and needing and you begin to discard the doctrines and values you’ve outgrown, or should never have bought into to begin with and in the process you learn to go with your instincts. You learn that it is truly in giving that we receive. Then you learn about love. Romantic love and familial love. how to love, how much to give in love, when to stop giving, and when to walk away. You learn not to project your needs or your feelings onto a relationship. You learn that you will not be more beautiful, more intelligent, more lovable or important because of the man on your arm or the child that bears your name. You learn to look at relationships as they really are and not as you would have them be. You stop trying to control people, situations and outcomes.
You look in the mirror and come to terms with the fact that you will never be a size 5 or a perfect 10 and you stop trying to compete with the image inside your head and agonising over how you stack up.
You learn, that for the most part, in life you get what you believe you deserve… and that much of life truly is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You learn that anything worth achieving is worth working for and that wishing for something to happen is different from working towards making it happen.
More importantly, you learn that in order to achieve success you need direction, discipline and perseverance. You also learn that no one can do it all alone and that it’s OK to risk asking for help. You learn that the only thing you must truly fear is the great robber baron of all time… FEAR itself. You learn to step right into and through your fears because you know that whatever happens you can handle it and to give in to fear is to give away the right to live life on your terms. And you learn to fight for your life and not to squander it living under a cloud of impending doom.
And you learn to deal with evil in its most primal state — the ego. You learn that negative feelings such as anger, envy and resentment must be understood and redirected or they will suffocate the life out of you andpoison the universe that surrounds you. You learn to admit when you are wrong and to build bridges instead of walls. You learn to be thankful and take comfort in many of the simple things we take for granted, things that millions of people upon the earth can only dream about: a full refrigerator, clean running water, a soft warm bed, a long hot shower.
Slowly, you begin to take responsibility for yourself by yourself and you make yourself a promise to never betray yourself and to never ever settle for less than your heart’s desire. You hang a wind chime outside your window so you can listen to the wind. And you make it a point to keep smiling, to keep trusting, and to stay open to every wonderful possibility.
Finally, with courage in your heart and with God by your side you take astand, you take a deep breath and you begin to design the life you want to live as best as you can.

www.chakradhar.net

Placing your happiness in the hands of others will lead to a lot of pain and disappointment, says Donna Thomson

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet,” said James Oppenheim. True happiness cannot be sought outside of yourself — not in your relationships with others, the groups you belong to, or in the things around you. Unless you can stand alone in your own shadow and feel happiness from within, true happiness may always elude you for external things come and go like the tide. The only constant in your life is you. Love you, admire you, value you and be happy to be you.
Why do we seek happiness from outside of ourselves? From His Holiness The Dalai Lama: “Consider the following. We humans are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others’ actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others’ activities. For this reason it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others.”
So we learn from a young age to rely on others rather than on ourselves. If we rely on others for our food, shelter and other needs, why not happiness? Well happiness of course does come from many things and our social relationships and other external factors can bring us much joy, but many of us have not connected with ourselves as we have connected with others. The negative side is that placing all of your happiness in the hands of others will lead to a lot of pain and disappointment throughout your life.
No matter how much you love a partner, a child, or a friend, you cannot make your happiness conditional upon them. Why? Because you will have certain expectations of others and when those expectations aren’t met, you may feel hurt, betrayed, misunderstood, taken for granted, invalidated, confused and so on. Everyone is individual. We have each grown to develop our own sets of values, beliefs, attitudes and ways of looking at the world. Our views may not be exactly the same as our loved ones. However, we often expect those loved ones to know what we want from them.
When someone else’s actions don’t live up to your expectations you are let down. Often the other person won’t even realise they’ve done something to cause you pain because they don’t know your expectations unless you have explicitly shared them. Often we don’t even realise our own expectations until we feel someone has hurt or disappointed us. For example, you may unconsciously expect your partner to show their love in a particular way such as saying “I love you” regularly and when this doesn’t happen you start to wonder if they truly care for you. You may feel unacknowledged and unloved. However your partner may feel that they are showing their love through their actions. You have one belief while your partner has another. Is there a lack of love? No. While you let your feelings build into a stressful negative state within you, your partner would probably be very surprised to know you feel that way.
It’s unrealistic to expect another person to know what’s in your head — your values, beliefs and expectations. Thinking “Well they should know!” is not good enough, yet most of us would have thought this of someone else at some stage. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. They see you become sad, angry, unresponsive to them, or upset and don’t know what they’ve done, or if it’s even them who has made you unhappy. This leads to negative feelings from both sides and possibly arguments that could be avoided through open communication.
Rather than looking to others for your needs, begin by looking within yourself. When you feel a sense of disappointment in someone, use it as an opportunity to analyse your own expectations. The only person who should truly be able to disappoint you is yourself — when you are not being true to yourself in some way. You can take that disappointment and turn it into a positive — a pledge; an action that you can take to better yourself.
Analyse why you are disappointed or hurt. You may find your initial thoughts or statements begin with “Because he did” or “Because she didn’t”. Now look deeper to the true reason for your disappointment. Such statements will start with “Because i expected”, “Because i wanted” or “Because i thought he or she should”.
You truly only ever have control over yourself and realising this can save you a lot of pain. Of course you can be disappointed in others but you have no control over their actions and reactions. You can share the reasons for your disappointment but you cannot expect the other person or situation to change because the other person has free will.
When you realise that you are responsible for your thinking and expectations, you will start to see that you’ve placed much of your happiness in the hands of others. You can now take your power back by recognising that you have the choice to react to something either negatively or positively. By making your happiness conditional upon another person, you hand your power over to them. You feel a ‘victim’ whenever things don’t go as you want or expect. In doing this, you set yourself up for pain, but you can now turn this around and instead set yourself up for happiness.
The key is to not expect a particular outcome. What happens next is up to you. You can choose to wallow in negative feelings which may further damage a relationship, or you can try to place a positive spin on the situation. Perhaps you can find your happiness in the fact that you’ve done your part in dealing with the situation by getting your issue out into the open. Realise that it may not be an issue to the other person, but ideally you will work together to reach a compromise. You can also decide to be happy for the other person and the pain they show you because it helps you to grow. There are always choices and different ways of looking at the same thing.
It puts things into perspective when you resign yourself to the fact that people do make mistakes — they forget things, they don’t think properly, they don’t always consider how others may be affected by their actions, they can act selfishly at times, and so on. We are all humans and we are designed to make mistakes as they are our greatest opportunities to learn. As Horace Friess says, “All seasons are beautiful for the person who carries happiness within.”

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Have you ever wondered what your subconscious mind looks like? There is no need for meditation, crystals or changing dimensions of consciousness for this miracle to be achieved. Simply look at your life and you see an exact physical reflection of your subconscious self. But how can this be? It is, I believe, based on a form of magnetism. This process allows us to determine our destiny and experience, even though our lives may appear to be controlled by events over which we have little or no influence. We all control our lives minute by minute. We just don’t realise it.
As this decade proceeds, the psychic and the openminded scientists are enjoying a fusion of perspective. Agreement is emerging outside the scientific establishment that our consciousness, the eternal us, is a series of energy fields working through, and animating, the physical body. This is our multi-dimensional eternal Self, that part of us which leaves the physical body at the moment we all ‘death’. We have a conscious level which interacts with the brain and the body and is therefore subject to the limitations of this world of dense matter. But guiding this level like some spiritual ‘mission control’ is our subconscious. This subconscious level contains all the thought patterns we have held onto from the past, all our concerns and ambitions for the future, and whatever we are thinking in the moment.
This amalgamation of thought and perception is, in short, what we think of ourselves: our personal sense of reality. These subconscious thought patterns are imprinted in our ‘aura’, the eternal Self. When we speak of someone having good or bad ‘vibes’, we are in fact describing the thought patterns (vibrations) that are being broadcast from that person’s aura. These are the vibrations that we feel when we walk into a house and immediately sense the ‘atmosphere’, negative or positive.
The aura consists of magnetic energy which reflects in every second of our lives, the magnetic patterns created by our subconscious – our sense of personal reality. These patterns attract to us other magnetic thought fields (people, places, ways of life) which create an exact physical replica of our subconscious sense of self. In this way we create our own reality. We are in charge of our lives and no one else. Back in the 1970’s when I was a news reporter with the BBC, I visited a hostel for what were then called ‘battered wives’. Some had suffered violence from two, three or even four different men, one after the other. I was amazed at the time. Why did they continue to live with the same kind of violent partner? I now realise the answer. The common theme of all those women was a lack of self-worth and self-love, an attitude that clearly went back a very long time. That sense of self, that subconscious belief that they deserved to be punished, created the magnetic attraction with violent men. The men, in turn, are those who have such a deep subconscious hatred of self that they are seeking a ‘mirror’ at which they can thrash out and so avoid looking within. I have yet to meet a violent person who did not have a deep hatred of themselves. When the women escaped from one violent partner, they merely attracted another because the magnetic pattern they were broadcasting (a lack of self-worth) was still there. That sequence can only be broken by changing the pattern – by loving and respecting themselves. The same applies to the men involved.
This magnetic attraction of thought fields is how we draw to us what we most fear; it explains love or dislike at first sight; why we are attracted so powerfully to certain places and ways of life. What we call ‘karma’ is, for me, just another word to describe this process of magnetic attraction. If we act negatively towards someone, it means there is an imbalance in our inner self. This imbalance (thought pattern) will eventually attract to us an experience that reflect that imbalance – our karma. This is not a form of punishment, it is an aid to our evolution because it means we are constantly facing our inner self. What can be seen, can be dealt with.
All this is more than esoteric contemplating. It is fundamental to changing the world for the better. The world that we see is the collective physical reflection of the sum total of what humanity thinks of itself. Humanity, in general, is programmed not to love, respect or forgive itself. These thought patterns have created the global reality, a world in desperate need of more love, respect and forgiveness between peoples. We can’t give to other what we don’t have for ourselves. We are also programmed to give our minds away and look to others to tell us what to do.
These thought patterns have created the reality in which a very few people actually control the direction of the world. We created all this by what we think of ourselves. Two things are worth remembering: the victim mentality creates the victim reality; and if you believe it, you will achieve. 

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No matter what you have been through, you can always get up and make changes, says Dawn Fields

Just think about this for a moment: How many times have you done something in your past that you were not too happy about? It could be anything.
Let’s say that you are an addicted person. You may be addicted to drugs, or alcohol or the wrong type of man. Perhaps you are addicted to stressful jobs that bring you little pay. It doesn’t matter what the circumstances may be. Hey, it doesn’t even have to be that harsh. Perhaps you have tried to start your own business or create something in your life where you could make a living doing something you are passionate about and it failed, so you gave up. It doesn’t really matter. But every time you turn around, you are falling victim to the same thing over and over again.
Hey, it happens. We all fall down. But the good thing about it is we get up. Just because you fell down doesn’t mean you have to stay down. Get up! Why are you still sitting there? We all make mistakes. But the great part about it is that God allows us an opportunity to learn from our mistakes and move forward. Just because you fall down today, doesn’t mean that tomorrow you must remain down.
Ever slipped out in public and actually fell down? Jumped up real quick, didn’t you? The next thing you did was looked around and prayed that nobody saw you. Just as quickly as you bounced up from a real fall, you can bounce back from a figurative fall. One thing that I have noticed from speaking with a lot of people is that they understand that we fall down but never understood that we get up too.
No matter what the circumstances are in your life that might have tripped you up, no matter what you have been through, no matter what happened in your past, you can always get up and make changes, right now, that will forever banish or
make obsolete, the bad things that caused you to fall in the past. Don’t get me wrong…I hear some very legitimate sounding excuses as to why people feel that their life will forever be the way that it presently may be. I hear things like “I was molested when I was young.” “My mother abandoned me when I was two years old and left me because she was out chasing the pipe.” “I have an addiction. How can I possibly get a job that pays more than minimum wage.” “I don’t have an education. How can I ever expect to get a good job?”
Stop living in the past! We all fall down. But remember, “A Saint is just a sinner who fell down and got up.” Your past should be a reference point, not a residence. But so many of us continuously live in the past. We went out and bought a welcome mat and promptly placed it at the door of our past. We can’t break away from it. We wear it as some sort of badge of honour because we simply won’t let it go.
Just because you made a mistake or circumstances led you to do something that you now regret, doesn’t mean that for the rest of your life you will have to beat yourself up because of it. Doesn’t matter if you made two mistakes or three. Heck, it doesn’t even matter if you made over a million mistakes in your life. What matters is today, right now.
You know the mistakes that you’ve made because you have that mistake as a reference point now and for the rest of your life. You weren’t born for sorrow. You weren’t born to be a doormat for others to wipe their feet on. You weren’t born to be used up and then disregarded. You were born to glorify God and live a happy and abundant life. And if you aren’t living that way, it’s simply because at some point, you fell down. But now is the time to get up and start living the life that you were born to live. And that is a life of purpose. That’s a life of happiness and abundance.
Now, you ask, “How do I get out of the past and get up?” Well, I would like to say, “it’s simple.” But that wouldn’t be the truth. There’s nothing simple about it. It’s a daily process that you must work on. You have to be committed to making changes in your life. You have to believe that God has a purpose for you. You will have to work on you. You will have to realise that what happened yesterday, is gone. You can never get that time back and, therefore, there is nothing you can do about it. But right in front of you is another minute or another hour or another day, week, month, year. Those things haven’t happened yet, so you can start to orchestrate your present so that your future will be more to your liking.
Start by telling yourself, over and over and over and over again, “My past has no bearing on who I am right this second. And, therefore, is not important. I am here to glorify God. I am God’s child and, therefore, worthy of greatness.” If you take this simple phrase and say it to yourself all day long, over and over again, you will soon start to notice changes in your life. All of a sudden, without even thinking about it, you will start to pack your old baggage from the past and move them to a closet that you will lock and throw away the key. 

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