Accepting Life as it comes

“Wherever you go, you are going to encounter ups and downs – pleasure and pain, fortune and misfortune, people who like you and people who didn’t care for you at all.” The nature of life is, up today, and down tomorrow, and God says, “Let life go up and down, you don’t have to go up and down with it”.

I have a friend who is interested in biorhythms, the built-in cycles of emotional ups and downs that each of us is supposed to have. The idea, of course, is that he can plot these cycles and pursue his goals when he’s at his best and relax when the cycles are down.

Unfortunately, the demands of life pay very little attention to anybody’s cycle. If they did, I doubt that we would ever learn to grow up, which in the Gita means being at our best always – loving when life is for us, equally loving when life is against us. It means going beyond the conditioned cycles of excitement and depression and to live in an abiding sense of joy.

Most of us do not think of excitement as a problem. After all, doesn’t everybody like to be on cloud number nine? But as all of us know, the cloud eventually disappears. Then we not only come abruptly back to earth; we usually burrow right into its depths and hide – that is, we go into a depression. In other words, the problem of excitement is depression. “What goes up must come down” is as true of moods as it is of Newton’s apple. Excitement and depression are inseparable aspects of the same phenomenon, the erratic swinging of mind: up with what it likes, down with what it doesn’t like. Because of our conditioning, we like to make a distinction, and say that when the mind swings up, the swinging is pleasant; when the mind swings down, it’s unpleasant. But God says, “No. Swinging is swinging.” In both excitement and depression the mind is in agitated mode, the focus of attention has simply changed.

This is an important point, because depression is almost epidemic today – a serious and wide-spread problem that often goes unrecognized when help is needed. Ninety percent of clients who come to me for healing suffer from depression. Most kinds of depression are not really physical problems. The drugs do not get at the mechanisms of depression; they only affect its symptoms. If you change your approach to life, this state of mind disappears.

Let us stand up and Be in the flow of life with Joy and Happiness. Let us welcome the New Year with this firmness in heart and mind.