This knowledge was passed down over the years by such great philosophers as the Buddha and Confucius, who said, “You are what you think.”
So, what does that mean? It means that life can happen all around you. Sometimes you experience great joys and other times you experience great sorrows or personal challenges, but how those events affect you personally depends greatly on how you think about them.
In my book, Awaken Your Power, I use the example of two neighbors on a street. A fire blows through the neighborhood burning down both homes. Mircaulously, all the family members and pets of both families are able to get out safely.
The first neighbor family is understandably devastated. However, as time goes on, they cannot get over the loss of their material home and their possessions in it. Their life seems plagued with negativity.
The second neighbor family is also initially stunned and disrupted by the fire burning down their home, but instead of focusing on the loss of their house, they instead focused on the fact that all of their family member and pets were able to safely escape the burning house.
This neighbor realized that a home can be replaced but their family members cannot. They actually feel grateful for narrowly escaping a potenial outcome that could have been much worse. So in summary, they were focusing on the gratitude of what they still had instead of devastation of what they just lost.
The lesson of this story is that the same event can happen to two different people but each of them can be affected differently based solely on how they think about that event in their life.
If your life is not as pleasant as you would like, then try “Changing how you think to change how you feel“, which is a quote from my poem, Thoughts are Things in my book, Awaken Your Power.
Feel free to reach out in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you.
Joe Rapisarda
www.JoeRapisarda.com
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