If you look around right now, do you detect anything that causes you to suffer physical pain or discomfort in your body? Provided that most of us have a shelter, sufficient nutrition and a selection of clothes to protect our bodies from conditions as well to be socially presentable.
If that is true, then why do we suffer, why do we struggle, why do we experience stress? If you look around yourself again, you may notice that for most of the time there’s no objective reason to experience any of it.

The brief answer is — our imagination. We forget that imagination is more powerful than knowledge because it reaches deep and colors our entire experience. Our imagination is our thinking engaged with desire. Desire operates on a plane of “having what we don’t want” and “not having what we want” and it weaves into a story of who “I am”.

And if we look deeply enough, we might begin to notice that most of the time we actually spend in imagination, rather than being present to what is happening around us.
Many of us are governed by the continuum of our imagination, rather than the ease of the present moment. We evaluate our past from a perspective of future fantasy, and we feel regret recalling that it wasn’t like we would like it to be. Or we ruminate wistfully about whatever wonderful enjoyment we had that is hopelessly gone.

Our hidden beliefs about ourselves and conclusions about life filter our experience of present reality. Because most of us aren’t trained, or forget to bring our awareness into the present moment to see where we are and what is happening to us right now.

We are overrun by unknown desire for meaning. We are looking for something to bring us back to feeling good. Most information sources telling us that having a new gadget, next toy or some fashion article, new experience or relationship is the cure. We believe it and try to put a lot of energy into acquisition of told cure. However, after some time, we may find ourselves at the same spot, again feeling something amiss.

This is an addiction hard-wired into our biology – our brain. We seem to be unable to tolerate satisfaction. We seek a thrill of fulfillment even when we have all our needs met. We have developed a brain circuitry that demands alternation between deficit and gratification having us firmly fastened to a seat of this roller-coaster ride.

We are often tossed without control at the mercy of getting high on a feeling of release from this state of deficit. Wouldn’t it make sense to ask this question: “why do I feel dissatisfaction as a benchmark, unless I have an experience of pleasure?”

Without our awareness we seek fulfillment outside of ourselves. Having been conditioned to assume that by merely addressing hedonic cravings, we can achieve a lasting state of satisfaction. However, if unrecognized this hidden desire for meaning will continue to knock at the “door” of our conscious experience trying to get our attention.

Mind as Roller Coaster

1. Develop a direction aligned with your life purpose:

We make our future right now. When we give purpose to our lives, we can easily give our energy single direction.
When you pick a direction, develop life’s vision, your very next step is revealed to you.

How to create an Ideal Life Vision?

Everything tends to follow that choice, and we can break ourselves off the habitual roller coaster ride.

2. Cultivate Grateful Heart:

When we begin to see all our past through the lens of gratitude. We look at our present moment and see it as a culmination of an inevitable sequence for us to be where we are right now and to choose our future.

Regardless of the result we inherited from our past actions, how we respond to them now creates our future.
Why this is better than blaming yourself, others, God/Devil or the circumstances.

• It opens your mind to possibilities to transform your perception and creative action.
• Whatever you focus on, you enlarge and attract more into experience.
• Gratitude opens your heart to connect to others.
• It prevents you from being stuck in a dead-end view of circumstance.
• It generates energy of optimism — an internal environment of initiative.

3. Enlighten Victim Consciousness:

Victim Consciousness is an attitude of dependency and powerlessness. It sounds harsh, right? But when we peg our happiness and a feeling of fully alive on external factors, we do exactly that — we give our creative power away to the “culprit” of our circumstance.
When we do that, we insist on constancy of this particular relationship within our consciousness, denying ourselves the power of choice.
It doesn’t mean that whatever injustice of hurt we experienced is not valid or should be dismissed. That is an external process of justice, and it is more successfully accomplished without generating victim consciousness.
In order to purge victim consciousness, we need to own our state — our conclusions, feelings, and emotions. In every circumstance, there are available three choices:
1) To leave the situation
2) To change the situation
3) Accept the situation
We shine light on the victim consciousness and reclaim our power by making the choice “ours”.