Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest and psychotherapist said, “There is only one cause of unhappiness; the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.”
I spoke at a recent Sunday Service about not believing everything we think. So often we find ourselves in challenging situations that are anything but peaceful. We’d like to think that life should be free and easy. But the reality is that life is always presenting us with opportunities to overcome.
It is easy to get obsessed with what is before us and try to figure out what needs to be done. We focus on the problem and as we do, we get more of the problem. What is called for is to shift our focus from what is going on in the outer to what is going on in the inner.
Each of us has been given dominion about how and what we think. Most of us have the idea that as soon as our current situation is resolved, then we’ll be happy and at peace. But in case you haven’t noticed, there is always something before us that can be a catalyst for upset.
To experience peace on earth, we don’t have to figure out how to get rid of our dilemmas; rather, we need to reframe how we think about them. It is easy to build a logical case for the cause of our upset. But the truth is we are never upset for the reason we think.
Most always, our expectations and beliefs about how things should be, ought to be and must be do not match our reality. The obvious solution is to want to change others or the situation. For us to attain peace of mind we eventually have to come to grips with we cannot change others, we can only change ourselves. Specifically, we can only change the way we think about others or our situations.
Blessings,
Rev. George