More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 10 - December 13, 2023
Feelings manifest as physical sensations in your body, not as an idea in your mind.
Today’s society is selling a version of happiness that can make us unhappy. We’ve become addicted to dopamine mainly because of marketers who have found effective ways to exploit our brains.
Once the initial excitement wears off, you’ll move on to crave the next exciting thing. This phenomenon is known as ‘hedonic adaptation.’
In fact, according to Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness, fifty percent of our happiness is determined by genetics, forty percent by internal factors, and only ten percent by external factors.
Your attitude towards life influences your happiness, not what happens to you.
The ego refers to the self-identity you’ve constructed throughout your life. How was this identity created? Put simply, the ego was created through your thoughts and, as a mind-created identity, has no concrete reality. Events that happen to you bear no meaning in themselves. You give them meaning only through your interpretation of those events.
Note that the ego is neither good nor bad; it’s just a result of a lack of self-awareness. It fades away as you become aware of it since ego and awareness cannot coexist.
Perhaps, we can say capitalism and the consumer society we’re living in today is the creation of collective egos, which is why it has been the dominant economic model in recent decades.
Some parents’ egos lead to the creation of a strong sense of attachment and identification with their children. This attachment is based on the false belief their children are their ‘possessions.’ As a result, they try to control their childrens’ lives and ‘use’ them to live the life they wanted to live when they were younger—this is called living vicariously through your children.
Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality, by understanding that we don’t need people. ANTHONY DE MELLO
Once you realize you don’t actually need anyone, you can start enjoying people’s company. You can see them as they really are rather than trying to get something from them.
To start taking control of your emotions you must accept they are transient. You must learn to let them pass without feeling the need to identify strongly with them. You must allow yourself to feel sad without adding commentaries such as, “I shouldn’t be sad,” or “What’s wrong with me?” Instead, you must allow reality to just be.
the way you interpret emotions, as well as the blame game you engage in, creates suffering, not the emotions themselves.
Emotions work the same way. They signal you to do something about your current situation. Perhaps, you need to let go of some people, quit your job, or remove a disempowering story that creates suffering in your life.
No matter how depressed you are, how much grief you’re experiencing, or how horrible you feel at a given point in time, this shall pass.
An emotion usually represents an amplified energized thought pattern, and because of its often-overpowering energetic charges, it is not easy initially to stay present enough to be able to watch it. It wants to take you over, and it usually succeeds—unless there is enough presence in you. ECKHART TOLLE, THE POWER OF NOW.
Often, a vicious circle builds up between your thinking and the emotion: they feed each other. The thought pattern creates a magnified reflection of itself in the form of an emotion, and the vibrational frequency of the emotion keeps feeding the original thought pattern. ECKHART TOLLE
Your mind operates on the famous computing principle of GIGO - garbage in, garbage out. If you do ill, speak ill and think ill, the residue is going to leave you sick. If you do well, speak well and think well, the outcome is going to be well. OM SWAMI, A MILLION THOUGHTS.
Your thoughts define who you are and create your reality. That’s why you should channel your thoughts towards what you want, not what you don’t want. As the success expert Brian Tracy says, “The key to success is to focus our conscious mind on things we desire, not things we fear.”
Never forget, you have the power to find meaning and joy even in the worse situations.
Our love of being right is best understood as our fear of being wrong. KATHRYN SCHULZ, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR.
What people think of you is none of your business
“Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.” It just doesn’t work.
Resentment is here to tell you that you must love yourself and value your peace of mind more than anything else.
One of the most ridiculous things we try to do as human beings is to want to change the past. What happened in the past was supposed to happen. Because it did happen. Now, the question is, what are you going to do about it?
One kind of lingering discontent, shared by millions, is the notion that others are happier than they are. I assure you, they are not. If you could only see the secret sorrows of those whose smiles and activities seem to indicate happiness. If you could only see how fervently they wish to be somewhere else, doing something different, being someone other than who they are. VERNON HOWARD, THE POWER OF YOUR SUPERMIND.
compare your ‘today’s’ self with your ‘yesterday’s’ self. After all, the only thing you can do is to try to be better than you were yesterday, last month or last year.
Life always begins with one step outside of your comfort zone. SHANNON L. ALDER, INSPIRATIONAL AUTHOR.
The fear of doing something new is often a sign you should go ahead and do it anyway. This indicates a great opportunity for personal growth.
Staying inside your comfort zone can also erode your sense of self-esteem as, in the back of your mind, you know you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do.
Courage is not the absence of fear, it is taking action despite the fear. Courage is realizing fear is not going to go away and doing what you want to do anyway. Without fear, there is no courage. As you face fear on a regular basis, you cultivate courage and turn it into a habit.
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. PABLO PICASSO
