Don’t Mind What Happens

Beginning this summer, I’ve decided to live my life by the mantra: “don’t mind what happens.”

And I’m serious about sticking by it.

Even if my house burned down? Yes. Even if someone I love dies? Yes. Will I grieve and experience unhappiness if those things happen? Of course I will. But ultimately, I know that it is part of the pattern, part of the grand scheme of what is supposed to be.

Everything happens for a reason. This is true (and the truth needs no defense). Anybody who denies this, is denying the collective, that all life, that all beings are one and the same, interwoven together.

You can only ever decide what to do right now, in this exact moment. You choose what to do, what to say, what to think about or not think about. Whether to be upset by something trivial, or let the changes and challenges wash over you, like water.

You might say the death of a loved one is not trivial. But everything related to form, to the physical, is in fact, trivial. And your loved one did not lose their life. They merely lost this form. The truth is, they are life! You are life. And you cannot lose something that you are. We are all the same this way.

The only moment you can ever utilize is the present, and you may choose to be upset, to lose yourself in grief, and be so overwhelmed by emotion and thought that you cannot do anything else. But, that is unconscious suffering. Self-created suffering. You have lost focus on the Truth, on the primary you, and your primary purpose.

You will feel unhappiness, hurt, and sadness from losing someone you love. It is important and healthy to process these negative emotions and experiences. In fact, addressing them and accepting them is the prime way to ensure they don’t trigger your pain-body! You don’t want to awaken that field of energy, or add to it. Rather, let the negative in, acknowledge it, and watch how surrendering to the experience actually energizes you with Presence. It will help you see the inner divine, the dimension of spirituality within, a little bit clearer.

If you want to choose peace and serenity each moment, you will. Regardless of what is going on around you. Therefore, I don’t mind what happens. Not anymore. Even if I lost all my money, my house, and everything I owned. I still Am and I will get by, until it is my turn to leave this plane. Once I depart this physical realm, the formless in me, the consciousness, it will go on. Yours will too.

So, choose to be at peace with each moment. If you are constantly stressed, worried, or anxious, it’s likely because your thoughts stay focused on the future or the past in some manner. The thing is, you will never get to the future. Same way you will never return to the past. Neither the past, nor the future, actually exist. You can never be in the future, because you will only ever be in the present moment. Right now. My present moment is writing this sentence. Yours is reading it.

Your future can only ever be what your present moment is. If you are stressed in the present and always thinking to the future, to what you need to do or achieve before you can be happy, then you will always be stressed, looking for happiness. You will never actually feel true joy, even when you finally achieve that big project or that huge goal you put so much effort towards, because in the end “form” and “doing” can never bring that rich satisfaction that the joy of “being” does. Plus, if you spent the entire journey in a negative state, being stressed out, you simply spent all that time polluting your body with bad energy and toxins. If you can’t enjoy the “doing,” the step by step of achieving your goals, then is it really worth doing?

Bet you can guess my answer. And you might argue, saying, “Well there are things I have to do, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to enjoy doing them!”

You are absolutely right. There are things you must do out of necessity, that no one really wants to do. For example, nobody wants to call a tow truck from the store parking lot because their car won’t start and then, while waiting, have to return all the groceries they just purchased because they’ll go bad. Or perhaps something as simple as doing laundry and keeping your house clean on a regular basis is something that you don’t want to do. What you have to figure out, whenever you are performing any kind of action, is if it can fit into one of three categories: acceptance, enjoyment, or enthusiasm. Eckhart Tolle speaks on these three modalities, explaining that to live in peaceful presence, each moment should align with one of them. If your action cannot, you stop doing that specific thing.

It really is that simple.

Can you accept that something is what the present moment requires, and that it is necessary to accomplish? Calling the tow truck and returning the groceries is one necessity that we must accept dealing with, so accept it with grace or else be angry and hateful throughout the entire process. You have to do it either way. Or, what about spending an hour on a conference call for something that could have been conveyed in an email? It might be annoying, but it’s what your job requires. You can either accept that the conference call is happening, or be miserable. You choose how to define each moment of that call. Can you accept that the dishes have to be washed after cooking, so that you may enjoy cooking with them again and eating the delicious food that comes with it? You can, or you can spend the time washing dishes being upset and negative. You choose.

On the next level, can you find enjoyment in what you are doing? This is where I aim to spend the majority of my day and time. In enjoyment. Even when I’m doing chores or running errands, things that many people find annoying or complain about, I seek enjoyment. I enjoy cleaning my house, simply because I love living in a clean space and I get so happy just seeing what I’ve done afterwards. I enjoy stepping out of my house to shop or go to an appointment because I never know who I’m going to meet or what adventure it might turn into. I’m also a big fan of doing things that we love to bring in money and pay the bills. And while it might seem like not everyone can do that, I don’t align with that thought pattern. We all have the potential to step into what we are supposed to be doing – something that we enjoy, at least enough to build a life around. It might not be right away, but the minute you align your primary purpose (Being) with your secondary purpose (doing) and start living consciously, things fall into place. You tap into a creative consciousness that works through your form to accomplish extraordinary feats.

And this is where enthusiasm comes in. If you are doing something you enjoy deeply, and you have goals in motion with said action, you are in this stage. You are engrossed, attentive toward your present moment, working with the divine and listening to its creative intuition. It’s where your best work will come out and flourish. Ideas may spring forth, processes come together, finales are born. Living in this moment is precious, and intense and divine. One could not possibly hope to live in constant enthusiasm, nor do I think I would want to. I’d be exhausted! But I love when I step into enthusiasm. This happens when I’m writing my novels, blog posts and in my journals. This happens when I’m working at my paintball park on the weekends, talking to customers and staff, building our business and bringing joy into people’s lives.

If you are doing something and you cannot comfortably fit it into one of the above modalities, then you don’t need to be doing that. Period. You don’t need to stay in a dead-end job that desperately makes you miserable. You will either take conscious action towards getting a better job (even if it takes time), or you will stay miserable, living in your moments, thinking “whoah is me,” and “my life is awful.” You choose. You do not need to stay in any sort of toxic or abusive situation or relationship. You only need the courage to leave, and work towards getting somewhere better. Or stay in pain and misery. I chose the latter for nearly five years as a young adult, and it was only when I decided I was worth more than bruises, cops, and hospitals, that I changed my life.

Give your sole attention to the thing you are doing, in this moment. Be attentive and focused on whatever action the present moment requires of you. Once you stop looking at everything that happens as separate, and assigning “good” or “bad” mental labels to them, you’ll start to see things together as a whole. Everything is connected and happening for one reason or another, and when we surrender to the moment and whatever we are experiencing, we will overcome the challenges and hardships with ease. We will enjoy the highs and happiness with a deeper richness.

We must stop being irritated by little inconveniences and mistakes that come about. You may label them as irksome, but spending an extra two minutes to change your blouse after a coffee spill really isn’t so terrible, right? You are where you’re meant to be, even if it’s two minutes late. It’s missing an accident, or possibly even getting into one! What’s meant to be will be. And the hard part for a lot of people is not being able to see the whole plan. They get worked up over every little inconvenience, every driver who cuts them off, or the long line at the grocery store. Or, they get so attached to labeling experiences as “bad” that they don’t see the magic of the pattern that’s coming together. Even those really tragic happenstances, like losing a loved one, are all for a reason.

That’s a tough concept for many people to accept, and many others will even scoff at this. They don’t believe “things happen for a reason” because they think it devalues their pain, or is minimizing their grief. In reality, this thought process allows you to process your pain in a healthy manner, and ultimately be able to move forward and continue living in the present moment, after the painful experience is over. Otherwise, you’ll risk staying trapped within that experience by way of your memories. And when your mind is consumed by the past, you cannot live in alignment with the present.

To live in alignment, you must be okay with whatever happens. You must take away the “good” and “bad” labels, remove the judgement, and let things happen as they may.

Take for example, how in late 2017 my husband and I (me being recently unemployed) met with his bosses’ accountant to discuss buying their paintball park. We were devastated when it didn’t work out, though I ended up landing a job with the accountant and worked there for five years (disliking math as I do, struggling through each tax season). Then, we found the partner we needed to make buying the paintball park a reality, and spent over a year closing this nightmare-of-a-deal, but it finally happened and I walked away from that tax job with the tools needed to succeed at owning our own small business. We are living our dream life with our dream business partners, and so much of it is possible because I took a job that I’d never have even applied to otherwise.

Can you accept living in uncertainty? When you surrender to the greater plan, to the pattern of life interwoven together, it feels just like this.

And honestly, that’s exactly what I am doing, and it’s how I feel life is meant to be experienced. Life is going to flow as it will. I won’t know everything, I don’t know everything, about me, or others, about what’s going to happen, who I am, or where I’m going. All I can do is live in Presence. See, our internal state will reflect outwardly into our physical experiences, so what we feel internally is what will come about externally. If you have an inner presence, and truly find joy in Being, your external reality will reflect this peace. If you are constantly worried and in a state of lack (lacking money, time, happiness, friends, etc.), then so your external reality will always be in a state of lack, and you will lack everything you think you do.

I wrote about something like this in my post, Cultivating an Attitude of Gratitude: once you start feeling genuine gratitude in your life, you will receive more things to be grateful for. So this is true for any aspect of life. What you genuinely feel internally, so you shall you see mirrored in the physical reality of your form.

Live in the present moment, surrendering to what is, and watch your life transform. It’s time we stop minding what happens.

Until Next Time –

Yours for Happy Writing,

Lady Jenji