Is Your Happiness Dependent Upon Other Peoples' Thoughts?Walt shares something he posted in a Facebook group today, and Alyxgives her reactions.Here is the text:My happiness IS NOT dependent upon YOUR thoughts, feelings, or behaviors.My happiness IS dependent upon MY thoughts, feelings, or behaviors.These truths seem so obvious, don’t they! And yet, it’s absolutelyamazing how often we forget them.In personal relationships, many of us forget them every day. How manytimes yesterday did you wish that someone else would behave differentlytoward you so that you could feel better?We also forget about them in work relationships. How often do we get allworked up when a coworker behaves in a way toward us that we don’t like?And yet, in getting all worked up, we make our happiness dependent uponthem.Discussions often have the same issue. Yesterday’s discussion about aremoved post was a case in point. Some people declared that theirhappiness was dependent upon whether other people discussed a particulartopic.This phenomenon also happens all of the time in the world of politics.Liberals, for instance, get all worked up about how horrible climatechange is and how everyone has a moral duty to join the struggle againstclimate change. Similarly conservatives, in another instance, get allworked up about how horrible gay marriage is and how everyone has amoral duty to join the struggle against gay marriage.In both cases, whether liberal or conservative, people get themselvesinto a state about how other people think, feel, and behave. And indoing so, they give away their own power. They abandon their own, corestrength.And we wonder why it is we get more of the thing we oppose! Climatechange campaigners find themselves with more and more instances ofclimate change every day. Gay marriage bashers find themselves more andmore confronted with gay relationships every day.But what would happen if we took what a good friend of mine calls“radical responsibility” for our own happiness? What would happen if wedecided that our happiness was solely dependent upon our own thoughts,feelings, and behaviors?When someone we’re close to behaves in a way we don’t like, instead ofpushing back at the behavior we don’t like, what would happen if we wereto emphasize the behavior that we do like? What if we chose to onlyrespond with what we do like without any worry about what they like andwithout trying in any way to change or challenge what they like?What would happen is that we’d be much, much happier.When the coworker says something we don’t like, instead of responding toit by pushing back at it, we could choose a different response thatessentially emphasizes what we like instead. And we could openly takeownership of the fact that we like it and that we don’t expect others tolike the same thing in order for us to be happy with it. Wouldn’t thatbe radical!It wouldn’t just be radical. It would be a much higher vibration.What would happen if the liberal, instead of focusing on what he doesn’tlike about climate change, focused instead on the fact that he likesclean air, clean water, electric cars, and all of the good-feeling stuffthat he prefers?What would happen is that the world’s vibration would rise.And what would happen if the conservative, instead of focusing on whathe doesn’t like about gay marriage, focused instead on what he likesabout heterosexual marriage and heterosexual relationships?What would happen is that more people would embrace the philosophy,“Live and let live.”There is a great gift in the idea that our happiness is dependent uponour own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and that in fact ourhappiness has no dependence at all upon the thoughts, feelings, orbehaviors of others. It is a gift of peace in one’s own life. It is agift of releasing resistance. It is a gift of feeling GOOD!To subscribe to the LOA Today podcast via iPhone, iPad, or iPod, clickhere: https://apple.co/2qlDSneTo subscribe to the LOA Today podcast on an Android device, click here:http://tinyurl.com/y6cm2yt9To subscribe to the LOA Today using any device, click here:https://www.loatoday.net/Our YouTube channel is at: https://bit.ly/2XRzhZDWatch our livestream at:https://www.youtube.com/c/loatodaypodcastvideos/liveTo talk with us on the phone go to: https://zoom.us/j/8602645432And for all of our existing LOA Today subscribers, please keep sharingon your favorite social media channels that you’re listening to LOAToday, so that more and more people can get their daily doses of happy.
