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The Courage to Be Happy It's All in the Perception A Moment Like This The Train We Ride The Winter of Our Discontent Standing on the Edge As the Days Shorten A Moon That's the Colour of Bone An Attitude of Gratitude Belonging to Tomorrow, Missing Today
When the Weeds Take Over the Garden Practising Who You Are What We Get is What We Are Lighting A Candle The Blues of Spring The Path of Change Beating the Valentine's Day Blues A New Year, A New You 
Free to Be
So often clients come to me and tell me how unfairly life has been treating them. Often and understandably they blame their partner, their family, their past for their present troubles and difficulties.Yet when I ask them the simple question:
'Is there anyone in your life whom you treat as badly as you treat yourself?' no-one has ever answered in the affirmative. No-one has ever said 'yes'.
This is the paradox: So very often we blame others for our woes and yet we would never dream of treating others in the way that we treat ourselves.
You know, there was a time before we saw others as the source of our own sadness and joy. It may well have been a very long time ago, but this, I believe, is our natural state of being.
It is we and we alone who determine what really affects us. And while it is true that external facts play their part, it is in the response we give to these facts that joy and sorrow truly exist. In reality, it is we who choose the degree to which we are affected by the experiences through which we pass.
Sooner or later we need to accept the simple truth that it is we ourselves who decide our happiness and our sadness.
If my work as a therapist has taught me one thing, it is that it is the perception -- the interpretation of our experiences -- and what we do with that perception which is so very much more powerful than the facts, the experiences themselves.
Yes, we can blame others and depend on others and believe that the world would end without that special person in it. We can wait a whole life time for that knight in shining armour or that fairy godmother to come and save us from ourselves or to give our life a meaning and a purpose.
If we are fortunate we can share our journey with another, we can form unions, alliances and partnerships. We can travel part of the road with others, but they cannot come with us all of the way. They cannot come with us to where we are going, nor can we go with them.
We are going to die.
Those who care for and about us may accompany us to the gates of death, but it is we alone who must pass through those gates and enter into that mystery.
Surely there is a lesson in this. And I believe that lesson has something to do with personal responsibility.
I believe that we can and should live our lives in a kind, caring and compassionate way -- an aware and a responsible way. But we can only do this if we are kind, caring and compassionate towards ourselves too.
The true lesson that death holds for each one of us is that, first and foremost, we need to become responsible for ourselves.
When we become aware, truly aware, that this moment holds all the joy and all the sadness that we allow then we become free to live this moment.
We become free to live our lives in the knowledge, and not in the fear, of death.
We become free to be.
' What the caterpillar calls the end,
the rest of the world calls a butterfly. '
Lao-tsu
the rest of the world calls a butterfly. '
Lao-tsu
Copyright © 2009 Peter Field - All rights reserved.
Reproduction in any form is prohibited
Reproduction in any form is prohibited
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