Stop Justifying your existance....

           

If you want to be happy, stop being sad!

The above statement might be very simple and more trivial in tone, but it contains everything you want to know about happiness. It insinuates happiness as a feeling caused by a state of mind rather than an external emotion based on outside objects. It drove me to look for happiness within me rather than in outside world and circumstances around me. I understood that you are a happy being to begin with and you make yourself sad with your thoughts; same as covering the lamp and then crying about darkness.

On my journey inwards, I discovered different scenarios that had the potential to drive me into thought processes that would result in sadness. Some of them were prominent culprits like regrets, fear and anxiety (more on those later), but there were also the subtle ones which had made a way into my normal thought process which looked good from outside but were really causing me to dive into more sad parts.

This article explores one of the most subtle tendencies which might be doing you more harm without you knowing it.

Stop justifying yourself….to yourself: Have you ever taken a step back and noticed how much energy you spend, in action as well as thought, into justifying yourself? That introspection will show you that majority of your days’ work and thoughts revolve around us justifying something. May be we are justifying our point of view at work or maybe we are justifying our stance or existence to our friends and family.

But the most venomous of it all is justifying your existence to yourself. By doing so we inherently accept that where we are in this time and space is wrong and we should be somewhere else. That very thought is a resistance to free flowing energy that is you and that resistance causes sadness. We have a picture of what we should be and then we are in constant struggle with justifying how our actions or thoughts are working towards that ideal picture. Now don’t get me wrong, you need to have your life’s ideal picture in front of you, but that doesn’t mean where you are right now is wrong. While traveling from US to India, I have to stop in Europe. Even though my destination is India, my lay over in Europe is not wrong. It’s just a point towards my Ideal.

Moreover, the ideal picture you portray about your life mostly comes from societal conditioning which is usually counterproductive if you are a free thinker. A lot of people get into roles that have been set for them by society (including parents) and try to live them out; while continuously shunting the inner call to change into directions of happiness. How many of you have been told to “Act your age”, just to find out that you gave away fun and your inner child in an attempt to “Act your age”.  On a side note, is there any chart that shows how to act at what age? I can make Billions selling those….

So what should I do? To begin with, don’t leap into changing yourself from what you are now. Start slowly. At the end of the day, take few minutes to analyze your daily activities and see which ones you did to justify yourself or your behavior. May be you said something nice to someone when you didn’t want to? Or maybe you said something bad to someone and then criticized yourself for that? Or more classical, you had big imaginative argument in a shower with someone and won it by justifying your point of view or your behavior. Once you identify these behaviors, it becomes easy. Just be conscious next time you are in one of these situations and just breathe and relax and walk away. If you cannot physically leave, just walk away from the subject in your mind. Slowly this will become your modus operandi and soon you will block one of the mental paths that was leading to sadness.

Be Happy !!