Author: Dr. Gary Huber

Life is a blast if we let it be. Or its miserable if we create that mood. Ultimately YOU are in charge and get decide what color to paint your world. Happiness is not a magic trick, it is a SKILL.

Here is an easy question to ponder:  Is line A short or long?  Light or dark?  
     Line A:     -----------------------       What if I offered line B?  ======== Thoughts?  Without a contrast or comparison Line A is neither short nor dark it simply is. Just like your friend Bill. He isn’t smart or dumb, tall or fat, nice or mean, Bill simply is. He is only those things when we JUDGE him. In order for us to make these judgements we need to engage the Ego. It is only through the lens of our Ego that things become good or bad. This is the source of all of our pain in life. We judge simple events that occur all around us all the time and then based on these judgements we experience emotions that color our day.  What if we were able to stop judging and simply experience the world as it truly is and not as how we have colored it. Traffic jams become simple math, lots of cars in a small space but without the judgement that it is bad or inconvenient it has no power to make us feel frustrated. Getting frustrated over the traffic offers no benefit. We don’t arrive sooner but we will arrive angry and ill tempered. So why judge it.

Try a simple experiment. The next time you experience an unpleasant emotion simply recognize that YOU generated it and so ask yourself why? Why am I choosing to engage in thoughts that make me miserable? Now look at what you “judged” in order to make this negative emotion. Now just for fun remove the judgement and simply take in the events as if they were fresh. Simply observe what is occurring without jumping to a conclusion, judgement or interpretation. Wow. It’s just air. It’s just stuff and people moving about. It isn’t intended to make you crazy or frustrated. So, let it go. Instead of being impacted by it, smile and accept it, conjure gratitude and generate a child curiosity. Did the entire frustrating event have a different feel or color? Congrats. You just claimed control over your world. 

This type of attitude takes practice but it is always there at your fingertips if you are willing to be happy. Many of us are more willing to generate frustration but clueless about generating happiness. Try this ideology on for size today and then see if you can engage it Monday morning. Share it and help others get into a cool groove. Every day counts and negative emotions suck the joy out of them.