4 ways to keep perspective

Every moment, you encounter situations with the potential to disrupt your inner peace.  You create a life based on your ideas of stability, security and what is required for survival.  Your mind sets you up to receive extraordinary gifts of insight.  This process helps correct your mistaken ideas about existence. 

When events unfold such that you lose a job, become ill, break-up in a relationship, feel challenged or jolted out of a state of comfort, then you learn how you thought things were is not how they are.  As you go through transitions of perception, you benefit from four ways to keep perspective;   

1) Focus on love and compassion.  Emotions that do not serve you stem from ignorance of how things are.  As you choose experiences that evoke healing emotions, this dissolves ignorance.  That is, when you consciously decide to send love to all people, including those who seem to hurt you, you begin to realize everyone helps trigger your revelations.

2) Develop a kind heart.  Tolerance is a stop on the road to deeper understanding.  Our moral strength is repeatedly tested as a way to encourage us to shift our sense of who we are.  As you imagine yourself changing places with a person to whom you are initially indifferent, callous, jealous, angry or negative, then you begin to sense why painful influences inspire a kinder heart.  Do unto others as you would have done unto you.  The nature of energy you send will come back to you.

3) Cultivate selflessness. Whenever your reflex is to place distance between yourself and a person or situation, ask yourself if your motivation is self-interest or something else.  The right thing to do is to put the needs of others before your own. It is a process to realize how this translates into your life and what sort of mindlfulness you are willing to create.

4) Favor mental flexibility.  In cases where you allow yourself to be too rigid, you are more likely to generate emotions and attitudes that do not serve you.  Where mental discipline is deliberate and conscious of intent, you grow to pay closer attention to detail.  This allows you to discover how the focus of your attention at a given moment creates beliefs that can be detrimental.  You find impetus to change.

Comments

[Alexys Fairfield]

Hi Liara,
These are really great tips on how to maintain balance and emotional footing. Just today, I had a lot of work to do, but for some reason, people kept knocking on the door. It's very unusual that people knock and it is even more unusual that I open when I am working, but today had it's own agenda, I was simply the playing the part assigned. I had to laugh about it later because it felt so "staged" by those mysterious powers that be.

Like you mention, we have to be flexible and let God work it's magic.

[Liara Covert]

Alexys, you have such a delightful way of expressing things. Many people would find it easier to shift their perspective if they evolved to believe God or some Higher Force was silently working magic in their life. As you so appropriately describe, human beings design their own agendas and often get disgruntled when unexpected obstacles or distractions divert them from a presumed path. To come to believe you are working on a different agenda that you have yet to grasp is a wonderful way to accept whatever is unfolding. Believe it is all good. It is.

[Daphne]

Hi Liara,

Your writing style is lovely - it has a calm and composed voice which I love to 'hear'. I think I need to work on compassion and having a kind heart, as I get impatient easily. I have to remember that there are many ways to do things, not just my way - this is the mental flexibility you wrote of. Great post!

[Miruh]

Hello Liara,

Your third suggestion, Cultivate Selflessness," The right thing to do is to put the needs of others before your own," is one I have a difficult time with to know the balance between setting boundaries, self care and caring for others. How do you do it?

Good suggestions. Thanks!