The Inner Work: An Invitation to True Freedom and Lasting Happiness

by Mathew Micheletti

This fragile mentality mistakes happiness, freedom, inner peace, and love as things that can be given or taken away from us in any instant. When someone says something we don’t like, inner peace is replaced with worry or defensiveness. If someone falls short of our expectations, joy is replaced with disappointment. If obligations arise, we are filled with resistance. If someone interrupts us, we are triggered with impatience. The result of this externally focused perspective is that we have allowed circumstances and other people to bestow good or bad emotions upon us, wrongly accrediting them as the givers or thieves of our joy. However, both favorable and unfavorable emotions are neither the result of conditions or other people’s actions; they are the direct result of which theme of consciousness we are living in and our chosen response to our life’s circumstances.