Riding the Roller Coaster

The past few days have been a roller coaster ride for me. One moment I’m happy, the next moment I fell into frustration and the next I’m depressed. Work has been frustrating. I became so emotionally tired.

I started to blame the company, the management, the processes, colleagues and everyone else. I begin to hope for a new job, new colleagues, new management. Maybe things will be better if I change a new environment. I wanted to escape from all these unhappiness, from all these madness and I wanted to look for happiness and peace somewhere else.

Then I begin to wonder, how many times have I experience these before? How many escapes have I made in the past? I have been changing jobs, always in search of a “better place”.

I realized that there is no better place in our outer world. Things and people always change. The things that bring us happiness today, might not bring us happiness tomorrow. For example, my manager praise me yesterday and I became very happy, but today, he reprimanded me and I became depressed and frustrated.

I always thought that I would be happier if I get a new job, or a new bag or a new mobile. But that happiness only lasted very briefly. So I concluded that true happiness and peace couldn’t be found externally.

If we continued to search for peace and happiness in all these things out there, we will always be riding the roller coaster, up one day and down the other. True peace lies in the heart. What this means is that we should practice looking inwards for inner peace.

When we look inwards, we will see that a lot of our unhappiness came about because we are either constantly looking to escape from this unpleasant situation or we are constantly looking forward to new pleasure. When we are here, we wish to be there. We can’t be truly enjoying.

It is time to stop whining and stop escaping. I’ll pack up my emotional baggage and start breathing.

A Peep at the Monster

I always have problem with my anger. It always seeps up onto me undetected, took control over me and turns me into a monster. It’s just uncontrollable. So many times, I tell myself not to say those harsh words, throw things around… my god! I’m acting like a complete freaking spoiled child! Totally disgusting, totally uncontrollable. It is so unlike me at times of serene.

I am determined to wipe out this monster in me. I hated it when it took control of me. I even hated myself at times of anger. Overtime however, I discovered that the more I hated it, the more uncontrollable it becomes. Anger can never be able to dissolve anger. I have since learn to accept myself, accept my monster and learn how to deal with him with more understanding.

For the past few times, I took the courage to come face to face with my monster and I ask him who he is. What is anger? Where do you come from? I realized that I have never really known him because I have been rejecting him all along. Whenever he is there, I try to run away from myself, hated myself and refused to look at him. I’m nervous to come face to face with him after such a long time.

But as I begin to see him, I begin to understand him bit by bit. The more I think about a certain event that I dislike, the more powerful he grows. Then he begins to take over me, I am powerless because I already gave him all the power I got. You know at times of anger, we always feel justify to be angry. That’s how we gave him the power and authority to be there.

I think ok, now that I know him, maybe we can live in harmony. Yesterday, however, I saw something that I have never noticed before and I started laughing at myself. There is no monster at all in the first place! My mind is playing a trick on me. This anger that we perceived does not exist anywhere!

It is not a monster, nothing solid, nothing permanent. We think of something that we don’t like and we start to feel uncomfortable in our body, we start to breathe more heavily and this uncomfortable body feeling we call it ‘anger’. The monster we perceived is just in our mind.

Well, I think my monster will still visits me now and then but I think I will not identify with him anymore like in the past.