It Is Not A Problem Until You Think It Is

One person loses their job and experiences stress, fear and anxiety. Another person loses their job and is excited about the new possibilities opening up for them. What’s the difference? The external life circumstance is the same. However the internal response is different.

Enjoying a life free from problems comes from seeing that whether something is a problem or not depends on the inner labels you attach to external events. Or, in other words, that your relationship with life depends on the inner thoughts you are having about your life.

You cannot control everything that happens in life,
but you can improve how you relate to what happens.

Mind Makes Meaning

One of the functions of your mind is to help you make sense of reality by attaching meaning to whatever happens each moment. Your mind is like an iceberg; only a small part of it sits above the surface of conscious awareness. The majority of it exists below the surface of awareness – within realms of the mind that you are not aware of during daily life.

Your unconscious mind, the part of your mind that you’re not aware of, takes the raw data about external events collected via your five senses. It then attaches meaning to the data gathered based upon your beliefs, values, thinking patterns, past experiences and other factors. Once it’s done this filtering process, it then passes a vastly edited version of reality up to your conscious awareness.


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All of this means that you don’t experience things as they are, but instead experience an edited version of reality, based upon the way your unconscious mind filters reality.

Problems in the Mind, not in the Moment

It has been said: “no mind = no problem”  because without your mind forming a judgmental opinion about what’s happening, everything just is. It isn’t good or bad, right or wrong, or better or worse. It just is! For something to become a problem you need to judge it as bad, worse or wrong.

The people, places, events and things that you perceive to be problems are not the actual problem. Instead, the real problem is you leaving the magnificent moment, judging what is as wrong and then resisting what isn’t how you think it should be.

Immense freedom comes from rising above the judgmental opinions of your conditioned mind. By doing so, you can discover how, in the main, the actions of other people along with the circumstances you encounter are ultimately neutral within themselves – neither good nor bad.

Instead, it is ultimately your mind-based interpretations of life, combined with your subsequent acceptance or resistance, that determines whether things are problems or not.

There is a difference between what’s happening in reality
and what you think is happening.
What you think about life is only your opinion.

When you really get this, you become able to choose whether you judge life negatively and in the process, experience pain. Or choose to suspend judgment and enjoy the peace that comes from engaging with life via a more enlightened perspective.

To Resist Life Is to Resist Miracles

The moment you stop resisting what is
and start accepting the moment you’re in,
all your perceived problems instantly start helping you.

Everything that happens each day does so to help you move towards and create the life you want. Granted, this is not always obvious at first glance! But if you suspend judgment for long enough, you will see how miraculous life always is. Remain open-minded and you can discover that every life event is a signpost pointing you in the direction of what you need to learn to love in order to experience your heart’s greatest desire.

To resist what happens is to resist the very things
that you need in order to get what you want!

Stress, pain and negative emotions all come from resisting what is. When you stop resisting and start accepting, you immediately release the blockages built up due to your resistance and allow creativity and compassion to help your joyful self out to play.

If you ever have a problem, ask yourself:
What am I judging and what am I resisting?

All problems are the direct result of you judging whether things are how you think they should  be, or not. This is because when you judge things, you make it possible for certain things to be deemed “bad”. The result of such a judgment can be to resist the things that you’ve judged as “bad”, causing yourself stress. If you want to let go of problems, for good, then stop judging people, places, events and things as either good or bad and instead, accept everyone and everything for all that they are, now.

Judging requires you to have expectations about how you think things should be. Expectations are based upon the past or future. What if you let go of your expectations, allowed yourself to stop struggling against what’s happening and embraced all now?

To judge the moment you’re in as either “good” or “bad”, you need to go into the past or future to find a reference point on which to base your judgment. In doing so you leave the magnificent moment and postpone your joy. Even if you judge the moment as being good, you can still postpone your joy, because your judgment is in the mind and your mind doesn’t know what true joy is. Remember, joy exists outside your head, in the direct experience of the moment.

Own Your Opinions

It Is Not A Problem Until You Think It IsIf you do choose to judge things, then own your judgments. Avoid making sweeping statements about how things are, as if they are universal truths that everyone should believe. Instead, make it clear that it is your opinion of what you personally think and feel, remaining aware that it is only your interpretation. For instance, the coffee shop doesn’t make bad coffee, you just happen to prefer coffee made a different way! Your boss isn’t bad; you would just prefer them to act differently.

By owning your judgments, you reduce your resistance to what is because you are aware that your judgments are only your opinions about things, not what everyone should think and agree to or how things must  be. You also recognize that because they are your judgments, you are the only person that can do anything about how you feel about what’s happening. That you can instantly stop all pain caused by things not being how you think they should be. Instead, you make choices and take actions in accordance with what it is you want while remaining open-minded as to whether what’s happening is good or bad.

When things happen in life you never know for certain at the time if they are good or bad. And if you are patient, you will more often than not appreciate when looking back on events that they were the best possible things to happen. Or put a different way, miracles are always happening, even if at the time we don’t always recognize them as such.

Sometimes not getting what you think you want
is a wonderful stroke of luck.”
DALAI LAMA

You can accept things so that you are no longer resisting them
and still take action to make things
how you would prefer them to be.

The difference is that when you accept things, you stop resisting them and no longer experience them as problematic. When you own your judgments and accept that all pain is caused by your resistance to what is, you will find that your joyfulness is nothing to do with your bank balance, your relationships or your job. Instead, your joyfulness is everything to do with accepting what’s happening now.

Stop Benefiting from Your Problems

Benefiting from having problems is one of the biggest barriers to letting go of them for good. To stop making things into problems, you need to be aware of how you may have been benefiting from not letting go of them before now.

Consider this for each problem:

  • What is it that you’re doing that you enjoy doing, but won’t be able to do when your problem disappears?
  • What are you not doing and what will you have to do when you let go of the problem?
  • Do the problems give you something to talk about with your friends and family?
  • When chatting to others about the difficulties you’re having, do you give each other love, support and advice?

Problems can provide you with purpose to your day
and meaning to your life, giving you something to think about,
talk about and “solve”. Letting go of problems could produce a gap.

Explore this:

  • What would happen if all your problems ceased to exist and you had nothing to solve?
  • What would you do with your day if everything were perfect, if you were perfect? What would you talk about? What would you do?

Stop. Take as long as you need to answer one of the most important questions you may ever ask yourself: What would you do if you had absolutely NO problems?

Your answer could be the difference between whether you recreate problems for the rest of your life or choose to stop living in the illusion of problems, stop creating unnecessary pain for yourself and instead, live a problem-free existence from this moment on.

No external person or event has the inherent power to negatively impact your inner experience of life. It is only your conditioned mind that will convince you otherwise. It is not what’s happened, is happening or might happen that is causing your inner emotions, but instead, it is your internal thinking about external life. The truth is that it is possible to raise your level of consciousness to a point where you don’t experience anything as a problem.

When living in a more conscious way you actively choose the meaning that you give to life events. Remember, events are events; they are not good, not bad. They are unable to emotionally impact you in a negative way – unless you think they are problems.

Instead of unconsciously attaching meaning to events, you can consciously choose the meaning you want. The consequences of this shift are massive because they will make your life circumstances irrelevant to your life enjoyment.

©2013 by Sandy C. Newbigging. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher,
Findhorn Press. www.findhornpress.com.

New Beginnings: Ten Teachings for Making the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life by Sandy C. Newbigging.Article Source:

New Beginnings: Ten Teachings for Making the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life  --  by Sandy C. Newbigging.

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About the Author

Sandy C. Newbigging, author of: New BeginningsSandy C. Newbigging is a meditation teacher and the creator of the Mind Detox and Mind Calm methods. He is the author of several books, including Life-Changing Weight Loss, Life Detox, New Beginnings, Peace for Life, and Thunk!  His work has been seen on Discovery Health Channel and he is a regular writer for Huffington Post and Yoga Magazine. Recently commended by the Federation of Holistic Therapists as ‘Tutor of the Year’, he has clinics in the UK, runs residential retreats internationally and trains Practitioners via his Mind Detox Academy. Visit his website at http://www.sandynewbigging.com/

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