SWAMI KHECARANATHA

Throughout history humanity has always faced difficult circumstances and conditions. Sometimes those conditions were created by nature, and sometimes by people – including ourselves. Whatever adversity we experience, the way out of the difficulty is living within ourselves, living in the freedom of our heart. We find that place through openness, through trust, and through inner discipline.

The hardest thing for us to believe is that we can live in our heart all the time, in a place of happiness and profound joy. We do not believe we can live there, because it has been our experience that although we find our inner connection, when we walk out of the door and something attacks us, we still contract and become unhappy. The test of life is, can we bring that inner happiness out into our lives, and hold onto it, no matter what we have to deal with in the world? Do we find true happiness inside, or out there? We must find a deep place in ourselves, and then hold onto it. That is where discipline is important, so that we do not just react to circumstances and lose contact with our center.

We have to realize that difficult situations are there exactly because they are needed for our growth. The energy we can get from them is the fuel and the nourishment we need to go deeper into ourselves. It is irrelevant whether we made a mistake (or thought we made a mistake) which was the cause of something happening. That energy and pressure forces us to go deeper within in order to get through it. And we are grateful for whatever comes our way, even if we don’t exactly like it. In this way, life makes us strong.

All too often we reject these difficult situations for a multitude of reasons, rather than becoming bigger and using them as nourishment. We forget to be attached to the one outcome that is important—that we stay inside and grow from the experience. When we are able to remain in our center throughout any difficulty, we keep our inner connection and strengthen it in the process. We have a responsibility to find this outcome for ourselves. With disciplined action, we learn to walk our talk. We choose happiness over all other.