Stop Thinking, Start Living. Richard Carlson
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able to maintain a sense of internal equilibrium irrespective of what happens to be going on around you. Healthy functioning exists independently of the external parts of your life. It’s a feeling within you that you can learn to access.
Once you understand that healthy functioning is a part of you, you will open the door to noticing its presence in your life. Healthy functioning will become your normal mode of emotional functioning when you accept the fact of its existence. Think back to the last time you woke up on ‘the right side of the bed’ and you felt a sense of gratitude about your life – the last time you said to yourself, ‘Life seems magical.’ Even eternal pessimists have moments when the magic of life inspires them. Try to recall the last time something happened in your life that you wish hadn’t happened, yet you maintained a sense of perspective, you kept your cool. Why is it that sometimes you are able to maintain your sense of perspective while at other times you feel as if you are going to lose your mind? The answer is that sometimes you are tapped into your healthy functioning and sometimes you aren’t. It’s interesting to note that if you have ever felt the feeling I am describing here – your healthy functioning – then you already know that it exists. It doesn’t have to disappear into nothingness and then reappear by pure chance every once in a while. Like intuition, healthy functioning is an invisible force within you that you can call upon. It’s a feeling that you can learn to live with. You just have to know that it’s there for you and to want it to appear – and it will.
Accessing and Aligning with Strength
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could learn to live in the state of mental health that I’ve been describing? The first step in doing so is to open your mind to the possibility. I have seen it happen to so many people that I believe it can happen for you. Know that if you have ever felt peaceful during a crisis, if you have ever kept your cool when others weren’t able to do so, then the possibility exists for this to occur on a regular basis. This book is about helping you to align yourself with your healthy functioning, your inner feeling of peace and strength. In order to overcome unhappiness and become a happier, more joyful person, you must find something in your life that is more powerful and important than your unhappiness. Healthy functioning is more powerful and beautiful than any source of misery. Once you begin to recognize healthy functioning in your life, it will become the most important factor. Discovering your healthy functioning is all you need to live a genuinely happy, productive life. If a problem can’t be solved while you are tapped into your healthy functioning, then it simply can’t be solved.
Two simple facts can summarize much of what you need to know about people. We are all very different – and we are all very similar! When our personalities or thought systems are turned on, we are but one of literally billions of separate people with our own individual stories, ideas, complaints, and dramas. In this domain, there is separateness, friction, stress, strife, and lots of unhappiness. Everyone is actively thinking and, unfortunately, believing most of what they are thinking. There is a great deal of confusion in this domain because everyone thinks that their way is the ‘right’ way. But when our minds are quiet, when we are simply ‘being’, and are aligned with our healthy functioning, we are all, in a very important sense, the same, at least in the ways that really matter. We are peaceful and filled with peaceful feelings. We are understanding of our differences, loving, and kind to ourselves and to others. We see the bigger picture, the innocence in our differences, and we can access the beauty of life.
As I just said, you cannot get rid of something as powerful as unhappiness unless you have something even more powerful to replace it with – your healthy functioning. This part of you is so much more powerful than anything you could ever ‘think of’. Your healthy functioning is a place inside yourself where you can rest in your being instead of being active in your personality. It is a place of meditation – but you don’t have to meditate to get there. You only need to know that it exists – and prefer to be there – to get there. Your healthy functioning allows you to live your life from moment to moment, always doing the best that you can. It allows you to remember that the most important aspect of life is enjoying it and feeling peaceful. When you feel this way, you are truly at your best, and everything tends to work itself out – and if it doesn’t, you know that it also would have if you weren’t engaged in healthy functioning.
Once you realize that healthy functioning is something that resides within you, and is every bit as real as any other part of your life, you can begin to call on it as a resource when you need it. You must, however, treat your healthy functioning as something that does exist; it must be more than an idea to you. It must be something you trust, like intuition.
Your Thought System versus Healthy Functioning
Your thought system is concerned only with the details of your life, how you compare with others, your worldly pursuits, your intellect, your ego gratification, and your endless supply of wants and needs. You can’t satisfy your thought system. Its job is to think, compare, contrast and analyse. It is concerned with what happens in your life. The set of guidelines within which it operates is totally inconsistent with enjoyment. When you align yourself exclusively with your thought system, as so many people do, you are doomed to a life of frustration and unhappiness.
You can’t think your way to happiness, nor can you do anything to make yourself happy. Happiness is a state of mind, not a set of circumstances. It’s a peaceful feeling you can learn to live with, not something you have to search for. You can never find happiness by searching because the moment you try, you imply that it is found outside yourself. It isn’t. Happiness is the feeling of your own healthy functioning. When you accept the idea that healthy functioning is a significant part of yourself, you can stop trying to be happy and simply learn to be happy.
If you don’t learn to trust in and access your healthy functioning, it’s impossible to learn to be happy, because rather than learning to look for a feeling within yourself, you will continue to pay attention to the negative thoughts that run through your mind.
Your healthy functioning is not concerned with what happens in your life. It has a more expansive vision. It is concerned with how you relate to what happens in your life. Obviously there is a tremendous difference between these two modes. Your thought system comes up with what ‘it thinks’ would make it happy. Your healthy functioning, on the other hand, is what makes happiness possible. If all you had was your thought system, you would never be happy. You would be able to think of plenty of things that might make you happy, but you could never actually feel happy. Your thinking mind would keep coming up with conditions that would supposedly make you happy, but when the conditions were met, your thought system would begin to process all over again – coming up with new conditions that must be met. Your thought system will come up with ideas like, ‘I’ll be happy when my financial circumstances get better.’ If you won the lottery, however, your thought system would start all over again: ‘I wish the jackpot had been bigger,’ or ‘Oh no, what if I lose the money?’ or ‘What if they run out of money and can’t pay me?’ Such thoughts would again start to fill your head.
Your healthy functioning is that part of you that allows you to feel happy whether or not your financial circumstances are what you would like them to be. It’s a place within you that always feels content. Your healthy functioning is not interested in what happens, it’s only interested in how you feel and how you relate to what happens. All events, the good and bad, come and go. It is only your memory, your thinking, that keeps any event alive and relevant. The key to unlocking your inner happiness is to realize that you are the creator of those thoughts. Your healthy functioning is the part of you that knows that the true power in life is in the thinker – you – and not in the thoughts themselves.
Your healthy functioning is not just a theory or a passive entity to be read about and then forgotten. It’s a very real, positive and living force within you that you can learn to access. And as I have stated, you have already accessed it many times in the past, at those moments when everything felt just right. The key to eliminating unhappiness and replacing it with joyfulness is to learn to recognize healthy functioning when it is present in your life, and to help it grow and develop.
Your mental health can never be completely lost, it can only be covered up by negative,