19 April
2010
Written by Brian Martin
As the years of my life have rolled by, I have been able to witness more of my behaviors. I've become more able not to go into automatic behaviors based on my past experiences, but to look at each event as a new experience and opportunity.
For so many years of my life, I had an automatic reaction to events based on my beliefs from the past and therefore I was at the effect of the event. I have also discovered over the years that ‘what you resist will persist’, therefore my recommendation to you is to stop resisting.
One of the most important things I have discovered (something that has been powerful for me over the last several years) is the power of surrender. I had great difficulty with this. As a boy growing up in wartime England, we were taught and told again and again, never surrender, never give up. While this doctrine was helpful in many things, such as in fostering my determination to create results, it also made me hang onto a lot things that did not work in my life.
I asked an amazing 90-year-old Japanese woman, who is going on about 20, ‘what is the secret of long life?’ She told me, ‘worry for a day, and if you can’t fix it in that time, accept it and surrender to it.' On thinking about this more deeply, I realize how this philosophy eliminates stress. Just understanding and accepting that ‘it is what it is’ and surrendering to it is very powerful. So change the way you look at things, and then the things you look at change.
‘It depends which side of the river bank you stand, that determines your viewpoints.' Remember if you keep resisting, it will keep persisting.
You do have power over your own life, you have a choice and if you don’t use it, then you will lose it.