Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
How to sustain a good mood?
Cory
Tennessee Veteran
My days, for the most part, are good. But sometimes I just get a bad influence and I end up saying or doing something stupid out of peer pressure or aggravation. Like today, someone was just giving me some advice on how to take care of my bonsai on Instagram. My step brother, being ignorant, is like "Oh he tried yo ass" blah blah blah this and that. So, it got me a little angry, I have no idea why,but I replied with something slick, but then I came back to my senses and realized. WOW i totally just said something I didn't want to say. I just want it to the point that nothing anybody says gets to me or bothers me. All I could think was "Dude, he was just trying to help me!" and now I feel really bad. How can I keep other peoples input from negatively influencing me?
0
Comments
One of my own faults was that I was extremely bad-tempered. Being a soldier, and senior non-commissioned officer, being bad-tempered was sometimes useful; my temper gave me the energy to get people motivated to complete a task, for example. But it also annoyed a lot of people, including my family.
When I stopped drinking I was still an 'angry man'; angrier even; so I read some books; Thich Naht Hahn has one out on Anger. It didn't help.
What I've found is that my daily practise of meditation, mindfulness, living an ethical life (as far as I can), and practising compassion has made me more peaceful and calmer; and a side effect of that is that I am less angry these days. I still often get tetchy; especially when driving; but I rarely lose my temper these days. Losing my temper has went from a daily occurance to something that's very occasional.
So my advice is not to worry about it, just keep practising, and you will find yourself being less negatively influenced by others.
Oh, it may also help if you realise that any time we're disturbed, it's OUR FAULT, not the other person's fault. We create the disturbance inside us; we're responsible, not them. That's a good thing too, because if it's our fault, it means we can do something about it. If it was the other person's fault, then we'd have no power to do anything about it.
Equanimity is helped by regular practice. Right speech by chanting.
A major part of Buddhist martial arts is learning restraint. If you do not learn restraint, people get damaged.
There are meditative exercises in such arts. For example the horse stance meditation.
Your brother and father might be able to understand such meditations . . .
Anyone know if those devises sold on late night TV really work?
I'm learning this as well. By idealizing our practice and judging ourselves on how well we are meditating or how much of a better person we're becoming (or not becoming), we can actually cause ourselves more suffering, even if we are maintaining a dedicated meditation practice.
So my advice would to be sit, sit, sit. Meditating helps us learn to observe without reacting or judging. Or at least, not as quickly. But sit without judging your own practice, without seeking results. You may even change without realizing it, "like walking through a fog" as Shunryu Suzuki put it.
http://www.unfetteredmind.org/mindtraining/fullindex.php
if you are in a good mood then fine great, you are in a good mood. If you try to per long it then you are grasping at a conception and it will cause you to eventually suffer, goodbye good mood. Even if you don't do that and remain in the present moment, your mood is going to change anyway because that is what it does. The trick is to understand how your mood reacts with it's surroundings and to be ok with things as they are, that is unless you can make a positive change some how.
Have you read or heard of the book 'The Way It Is'? This may help you, it helped me quite a bit in fact.
"trying" to " sustain a good mood" is clinging(2nd noble truth the cause of dukkha is craving/clinging), which is the cause of Dukkha(1st noble truth conditioned existence is dukkha).
when you cling to "good mood" out of ignorance(not knowing the 4 noble truths through your own experience), you cause dukkha(suffering/unsatisfactoriness). So in TRYING to be happy you make yourself unhappy, the great irony
all things are impermanent(ever changing, not lasting forever).. there is no such thing as "maintaining a good mood" because all conditioned things are impermanent. The only thing you can do is be kind to yourself, observe your mood changes objectively, and know that this too shall pass.
this dhamma talk by Ajahn Brahm should be helpful in this situation. " dealing with the emotion"