Everything can be taken from a man except the last of human freedoms: that of choosing his attitude toward destiny and charting his path,” wrote Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and renowned psychiatrist. If someone who has been tortured in Auschwitz and has been on the verge of death can recognize that he is free to choose his attitude, it is reasonable to think that we can all do it.
We often fail to see that values and attitudes can be chosen and we let them choose us. But attitude is not something that happens; It can be cultivated and enhanced.
The first step to do this is to become aware of the negative aspects of the attitude that is maintained in the present. You have to ask yourself: “What do I value? Am I consistent with those values? Why not?”
One has to know what attitude one wants to cultivate and put in place the means to achieve it. When you pay attention, your attitude begins to change almost by itself.
Everyone has the right to choose their attitude and decide what adopting it will entail. If you choose healthy attitudes and cultivate them conscientiously, life takes on a different light, relationships become more joyful and you feel more fulfilled.
10 THINGS YOU CAN DO TO ENHANCE YOUR VALUES
1. HAVE A SINCERE INTENTION
Every achievement obeys an intention. Intention is the seed of creativity, which is watered with effort. Without a clear, firm, and sincere intention things do not happen, but with it, even miracles occur. You just have to look at exceptional people.
The Missionaries of Charity of Mother Teresa of Calcutta arose because a young Albanian nun responded to her inner call. When she asked her superiors to find the order, she knew she was as ordinary and as confused as any of her peers. She didn’t have to stand out. But she had a great project and she believed in herself. She knew she could pull it off and improve the lives of others.
Human beings, as insignificant as we are, have an immeasurable capacity. Our dreams come true to the extent that we strive for them.
Nothing can take us further than having a sincere intention. When you want something you are saying to life: “I know I am confused and arrogant, but I am sincere, I am radiant and I want to learn your lessons.
2. BE COMPASSIONATE
It took me years to appreciate the challenge of being a good and consistent person and to realize that authentic generosity – that which dedicates time, energy, resources, and love to others – is the exception to the norm.
Most people try to be good and kind – and succeed to a greater or lesser degree – but compassion is something much deeper and is discovered by learning to love the world and others more than oneself.
Compassion is built with practice, experience devotion, love, and suffering. When you suffer, due to the trials that life presents, you open your heart to others and understand their suffering better. Those who are mean or hurtful usually do so because they are suffering and do not know how to digest the pain.
The love and understanding that the Dalai Lama shows towards the Chinese soldiers is compassion. Mahatma Gandhi was compassionate when he prayed for his assassin after receiving the bullet that killed him.
Whoever truly forgives someone who has hurt or betrayed them deeply knows what compassion is: we all experience it when we feel in communion with the world, or when selflessly helping a stranger.
3. RELAX INTERNALLY
Personal transformation requires a delicate balance between effort and relaxation. Relaxation is an internal disposition: you can be relaxed doing a lot of things and very tense sitting on the couch. It arises when one learns to trust life and at the same time measures one’s strength well so as not to fill one’s daily life with unnecessary tensions.
Deep breathing, meditation, yoga, and other exercises, getting enough sleep, and eating well are some of the activities that help you relax.
Relaxing is knowing how to let go of control and learning to cooperate with the natural rhythms of life. Paradoxically, it cannot relax but it is relaxation that comes when we let everything flow within us.
4. ACCEPT VULNERABILITY
Vulnerability is good. Many people, especially men, are put off by hearing this word because they associate it with someone weak, defenseless, or who exposes themselves too much.
But vulnerability indicates great inner strength. Opening up is a way to be better protected because one no longer needs to constantly defend oneself for fear of what one may feel or the harm that others may do to oneself.
Putting on a shell doesn’t help anyone, nor does insist on continuing to protect yourself when it’s no longer necessary. By opening up to life, on the other hand, the hardness within us softens.
Sometimes we fear that if we become too soft, someone might hurt us, so we anticipate it by becoming tough. It’s hard to believe that softness can be more powerful than hardness.
But when you learn to be more flexible inside, without giving up setting some necessary limits, you are leaving the door open for life to enter with all its beauty and pain, to be transparent and not suspicious, so that others can enter. better and thus enjoy greater privacy.
It is vulnerability and the sense of authenticity that accompanies it that allows us to experience genuine intimacy with others and with life. Pain is part of life, and to love deeply you also have to know what it means to suffer deeply.
Love combines openness and warmth. And by opening his heart he shows his vulnerability. It is present and available. Those who seek personal transformation do not advance until they decide to do so. Once the decision is made, the transformation is assured.
5. SEEK CONTENTMENT
For many of us, of course, they exist! Happiness is often made to depend on circumstances. If everything goes the way I want, people treat me well and I have bought clothes, I feel good. If things go wrong, my son doesn’t listen to me, my partner doesn’t want sex or I find out I have cancer, I feel bad.
This reaction is understandable. We seek pleasure and avoid pain, and to the extent that we achieve it, we consider ourselves happy. But this type of happiness is very fragile.
However, contentment – santosha in Sanskrit – does not depend on circumstances or emotions. It is an inner state that emerges when one is receptive, flexible, and open to what life offers. It is willingly accepting what it gives us instead of demanding that it be different. It is feeling grateful, even when it doesn’t give us what we think we want.
6. CULTIVATE PASSION
“Passion binds the world, but it also sets it free,” says a saying. Many sacred texts command to appease passions. That is why spiritual people are often thought to be quiet and sweet and do not like wine, sex, music, or beauty.
It is believed that being spiritual is equivalent to being impassive or boring. However, many great religious people – such as Thomas Merton, Swami Vivekananda, Teresa of Ávila, or Thich Nhat Hahn – were moved by a great passion.
The best spiritual teachers I have known, and also those who have followed them, have an enormous capacity to live fully and advance with firm footing and a lot of love through the labyrinth of life.
7. SEEK EQUANIMITY
In a beautiful Zen story, the 18th-century Ryokan master, after his house was broken into, wrote: “The thief left the moon in the window.” He accepted what had happened, without getting upset.
It is easy to get carried away by circumstances without finding a point of balance to lean on. But then life becomes a roller coaster that goes up or down depending on how you are emotionally. Some externalize it and live it as a drama, and those who keep it to themselves and become resentful, depressed, or sick.
Cultivating equanimity is learning to remain calm in any situation, even if it is adverse. You don’t have to take everything that happens to heart: neither the things that go well are a reward nor the things that go wrong, a punishment.
Equanimity is learned by practicing inner stillness. Like other attitudes, it is cultivated through conscious breathing, meditation, yoga, and other forms of mental relaxation.
8. DEVELOP A SENSE OF HUMOR
“Listening to some devotees, one imagines that God never laughs,” wrote the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo.
The writer Ángeles Arríen remembers how, being a very serious young woman determined to continue on the spiritual path, her teacher gave her a mantra to practice. Once at home, she began to recite the sacred Sanskrit syllables that had been assigned to her. “Sansah humah, sansah humah, sansah humah”, she repeated herself over and over… until she suddenly realized it. “Sense of humor! Sense of humor!” Her teacher told her to cheer up and not take herself so seriously!
A sense of humor not only helps you cope with life’s tribulations. It is a valuable tool for personal transformation. When you laugh, you lower your guard and become more receptive and permeable.
9. OPEN TO MAGIC
In Alice in Wonderland, the queen confesses to Alice: “Sometimes I have come to believe in up to six impossible things even before breakfast.”
On every spiritual path, we must strive to cultivate the capacity for wonder and openness to the magical. Magic is part of the world, but most of us give up our ability to capture it.
We were all capable of wonder when we were children. And we can feel the magic when we fall in love, in front of nature, in front of someone exceptional, in sacred rituals…
Now, the ability to be amazed and see the extraordinary in everyday life can be cultivated. You train yourself by paying attention to details, valuing the little things, and appreciating that fleeting flash that life consists of. It is not easy to open oneself to the inconceivable, but openness precedes perception.
10. BE PATIENT
“Lord, grant me patience, but hurry!”, read a plaque that hung in my kitchen for years.
Impatient by nature, over time I have realized that my impatience does not help to accelerate my transformation, nor does it help me to watch the water being heated so that it boils faster.
There are so many things that don’t come when you want life to end up teaching you to be patient. “The flower will not open because I shout open!” said Jungian psychoanalyst Marion Woodman.
Transformation is a journey that lasts a lifetime. When you continue to suffer and the desired transformation does not come, it is easy to become impatient and even feel like you are failing.
To cultivate patience you have to learn to trust and have faith that everything will come… in due time.