The beauty of contentment
To be discontented is like giving some food for the mind to chew. The mind will feed on it and keep itself busy. What happens when we feel too contented? The mind becomes starved. It doesn't know what to do. It starts searching for its food!
A lady went to a shoe store.
She asked for shoes to fit her feet and the salesman patiently showed her many pairs of shoes.
She tried on one after another and felt that none of them fit her perfectly.
Finally, the salesman showed her a pair and asked her to try them on.
She tried them on and said, 'They fit too well. I wonder if this is the right size*.*'
When you are determined not to feel contented, then no one can help you. It is a state of mind which only you can help. Most of us feel a certain comfort zone in talking and feeling discontented, because there is always something to talk about; the mind is occupied all the time.
To feel contented always is like losing the mind. This is also why, although we claim that we want to feel contented always, we are not ready when it happens. Our mind plays cunningly because it needs something to chew on.
We feel secure when we run behind the horizon. The horizon is only an
Always remember that everything belongs to Existence. imaginary line, but we feel secure running behind it because there is something to run behind! The mind has been trained to run always!
When you are like this, you are actually fooling yourself, that's all. You are creating self-contradictory results for yourself. For example, you want to feel contented at the bottom of your heart, but you keep denying yourself contentment by constantly complaining and refusing to see what has been given to you! You want something but bring something else upon yourself. And you feel comfortable in continuing to try to achieve contentment as a lifelong process!
Understand that the moment you create self-contradictory results for yourself, your misery starts. Try to be clear on how you would like your life to be and direct every ounce of energy towards making it that way. When you function with this clarity, you will never delude yourself and you will see that you soon become what you want to be!
When you enter into a space where gratitude becomes your meditation, contentment automatically happens. The normal contentment that we all know always comes with a reason. It is related to something that has happened in the outer world that has temporarily put your busy mind to rest, that's all. When your mind is restful, you say you are contented. Real contentment is not this.
Real contentment is when you feel permanent gratitude towards the benevolence of Existence. Real contentment asks for nothing more. It simply enjoys everything without a reason; it needs no reason. When you reach this state, you will not know what discontentment is all about.
A small story:
A man once went to a doctor and complained of insomnia.
The doctor asked him, 'So, you are unable to sleep at all at night?'
The man replied, 'I sleep well at night, doctor.'
The doctor asked, 'Then what is the problem?'
The man said, 'I am unable to sleep in the afternoons and evenings.'
We are all asking for more and more without any scale of measure. Even if we have a scale, it is infinite; that is the problem. We are
Try to be clear on how you would like your life to be and direct every ounce of energy towards making it that way. completely blinded by our attitude of asking for more. We don't even know where we stand, because of this. We haven't looked inwards in a long time.
Try to remember this joke whenever something is bothering you. Immediately try to connect with the joke and see with awareness what is bothering you. Go deep down and see whether you are really having a problem or you are simply allowing your mind to play. You may just laugh at the end of it.
A lady was traveling on a long-distance flight.
The airhostess came serving food for everyone. She found one lady fast asleep and so she moved on to the next person.
The lady woke up after a while and asked for her food.
The airhostess brought her food for her.
The lady touched the food and flared up, 'What sort of an airline are you running? The food is not warm. I have paid through my nose to take this flight and I can't even get warm food!'
The airhostess apologized saying, 'Ma'am, please excuse us. The warmer is not working. The rest of the people also had their food this way.'
The lady said, 'Is that so? Then it is alright.'
See, the food remained cold even then, but the lady was no more unhappy because she knew that everyone else also had their food that way! This is what I mean when I say that everything is a play of the mind; everything is an adjustment of the mind. The mind keeps switching its stance and playing on you, because you have allowed it to take over. You have not centered yourself on contentment and so you sway according to your mind.
So as I was saying, if you are not able to laugh at the end of the day, it means that you are still serious about the whole thing; you still feel that you are shouldering the whole world and that it is because of you the whole show is running.