How to make better decisions
25th October 2021
‘When making a decision I don’t want to check inside of me first to see what I want and what I don’t want…I want to pay attention at what the universe is creating in front of me and let me see how can I participate in that, be part of that, instead of interfering with it with my desires and my fears. That is living from a place of surrender’
— Excerpt from Sounds True audio interview with Michael Singer, Living from a place of surrender.
What if making a decision wasn’t about the thing we’re trying to decide. The house move, the change of career, the divorce… What if any decision we make was always about trying to decide what outcome is going to make us the most open, joyful and enthused. Is that not the ultimate goal, always?
And so if that’s the goal, making decisions about stuff outside ourselves can be a gruelling process, as we’re asking our minds to compute past, present and future information and come up with an answer of what outcome would make us feel more of those positive emotions…even if it’s just marginally so.
But if you’re over 25, you’ve already had some experience of how this way of getting to a state of bliss, is not generally achieved by any outside outcome. It does for al little while, when things are new but it very quickly fades away. Getting what you want and staying away of what you don’t want doesn’t make you happy.
So what if there was a different way to approach getting yourself feeling open, joyful and enthused…what if I told you that you could be happy even when things don’t go your way and that the only thing you have to do is to decide that is going to be so…
It’s a simple solution albeit not an easy one to implement moment by moment as we’re so used to playing mind games with our desires and fears we hardly realise we’re doing it, but it’s possible to decide to be happy no matter what happens, it’s an active attitude you need to cultivate and it requites mindfulness from moment to moment to catch yourself when your mind starts going it’s usual way. But it’s definitely the most worthwhile and effective way that I’ve encountered to feel that bliss that we’re all chasing. It was within us all along, we’ve just been looking in the wrong places.