Reach ! I am my Scar!!! There are many occasions in life where the "inner peace" is challenged. Rather than learning how to be tolerant of difficult feelings, many of us have learned only to avoid them... our inclination is often to run from our emotions because they carry with them the threat of destruction. Indulging ourselves in thinking as a protective alternative, we try to avoid our fear by staying aloof of our feelings. I being the victim for long felt that it’s high time to fight that out. Because I always had "reasons" to be afraid and I am now being bombarded daily with more reasons to choose fear as my response... So many things happen in life that doesn’t seem to be part of the plan. An unexpected attack of fascination and illusion though happened for a short time, has left breathing sensation upon the cells and tissues. Whether it involves loss of a kin, the bloom or end of a relationship, our family, a situation takes place and we seem to have the rug swept out from under us. Yet, each challenge comes with a message, with a gift, that we can only discover if we listen to what it has to say; which seems to be very easy while advising or thinking of getting better; rather to take it as such to the heart. Because it cannot be put into words how it feels to be let down by dear and near. Trust and faith; the two items which are in very high demand these days. Reflection on happiness!!! A most common tendency of people is to explain feelings of happiness or unhappiness in terms of the external events of their lives whereas happiness by positives and unhappiness by negatives. The implication is that events determine whether or not they are happy which shouldn’t be the case. I have always suspected that our own attitudes have far more to do with how happy we are than any external circumstances. We all have commitment to happiness, putting negatives in the background and positives in the foreground, and not tormenting ourselves over those things out of our control. I had met few beautiful souls who made me think that being joyful is a more natural state. Yet their life had not been easy. They never spoke of past struggles with any hint of self-pity. I saw them hit by disappointing experiences from time to time, saw them sad or muted for a few hours (rarely longer than a day), then saw them bounce back to their natural state of joyfullness without any evidence of denial or repression. Their happiness was real and larger than any adversity. When I would ask such persons about their resilience, they would say, "I'm committed to being happy." And they added, "That takes self-discipline." Some almost never went to sleep at night without taking time to review everything good in their life; those were typically their last thoughts of the day. I thought that this was important. Then I thought of something I had noticed about myself. With every decade my childhood kept getting happier. If you asked me at my schooling or at twenty to describe my early years, the report would not have been different about the key facts, but the emphasis would have been different. At ten or twelve, the negatives in my childhood were foreground in my mind the positives were background; at twenty, the reverse was true. As I grew older, my perspective and sense of what was important about those early years changed. The more I studied and thought about other happy people I encountered, the more clear it became that happy people process their experiences so that, as quickly as possible, positives are held in the foreground of consciousness and negatives are consigned to the background. This is essential to understanding them. But then I was stopped by this thought: None of these ideas are entirely new to me; at some level they are familiar; why have I not implemented them better in my life? Once asked, I knew the answer: Somehow long back, I had decided that if I did not spend a significant amount of time focused on the negatives in my life, the disappointments and setbacks, I was being evasive, irresponsible toward reality, not serious enough about my life. Expressing this thought in words for the first time, I saw how absurd it was. It would be reasonable only if there were corrective actions I could be taking that I was avoiding taking. But if I was taking every action possible, then a further focus on negatives had no merit whatsoever. If something is wrong, the question to ask is: Is there an action I can take to improve or correct the situation? If there is, take it. If there isn't, I do my best not to torment myself about what is beyond my control. Admittedly this last is not always easy. Turning my painful realities into personal cultivation and my response to these realities is sculpturing my life yet not shaping which seems to be far beyond. And now, I recover more quickly from disappointments but with the unhealed wounds somewhere unnoticed beneath everything in my heart.Self hypnosis views the brain as a giant computer that will believe what we feed it, good or bad. Maybe I was simply feeding my brain the wrong diet. I'm not sure, at what exact time it all came together, but it did. The key ideas are: Begin each day with two questions: What's good in my life?--and what needs to be done? The first question keeps us focused on the positives. The second reminds us that our life and well-being are our own responsibility. The world has rarely treated happiness as a state worthy of serious respect. And yet, if we see someone who, in spite of life's adversities, is happy a good deal of the time, we should recognize that we are looking at a spiritual achievement--and one worth aspiring to.