The role of contentment in controlling bad habits April 13, 2014
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Self-Discipline.Tags: bad habits, contentment, controlling habits, harmful habits, lifestyle, personal development, personal growth, philosophy, positive thinking, Richard Carlson, self-improvement
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Richard Carlson, in his personal development book You Can Be Happy No Matter What, says, “The dynamics of healthy psychological functioning tell us that you get your positive feeling back by releasing the thoughts that are taking your good feelings away.”
If we do not have serenity (contentment), Carlson says, we are then tempted to turn to other (outside) sources in a misguided effort to achieve contentment, such as excesses of: alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, food, exercise, sex, and work.
“Serenity or contentment,” he adds, “is the breeding ground for positive change…if you have serenity, eliminating bad habits is both possible and enjoyable, but without serenity, change is difficult, almost impossible.”
Can this approach work for everyone?
In terms of bad habit reduction or elimination, Carlson’s theory raises the following dynamic:
Can we think ourselves into a new way of acting (and therefore achieve contentment)? or;
Do we need to act ourselves into a new way of thinking (and thereby achieve contentment)?
The path to be taken to achieve contentment or serenity may actuallly depend more on the individual and his or her specific circumstances.
For some people, a particular bad and harmful habit may so debilitating that it must somehow be removed before an individual can have enough peace of mind and unclouded thinking to be able to work effectively on their self-improvement program.
For others, they must use a variety of techniques to gain some measure of peace of mind and clear thinking before they can have the mental and emotional strength to seriously work on reducing or eliminating a harmful bad habit.
Ego management: The power of personal grievances April 12, 2014
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Ego Management.Tags: A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle, ego management, managing the ego, negative thinking, pain-body, personal development, personal growth, philosophy, self-improvement
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Unless we first take steps to control our ego, our efforts within a personal growth program will amount to little.
That is one inference we can make about the huge influence of the ego, and particularly what Eckhart Tolle calls the ego’s creation, the pain-body, on our overall thinking, actions, and development.
Interpreting Tolle broadly, each person’s pain-body, is a collection of grievances accumulated by the ego (the voice in our head), and this though-accumulation has a pronounced effect on our entire behaviour pattern.
In his book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, Eckhart Tolle observes:
“The voice in the head has a life of its own. Most people are at the mercy of that voice; they are possessed by thought, by the mind. And since the mind is conditioned by the past, you are then forced to re-enact the past again and again.”
This can lead to a vast collection by the ego of grievances – a storehouse of real and imagined slights, injustices, and examples of unfairness in our lives.
Welcome to the pain-body.
“The voice will be blaming, accusing, complaining, imagining. And you are totally identified with whatever the voice says, believe all its distorted thoughts. At that point, the addiction to unhappiness has set in,” Tolle says.
How to control or manage the processes of the ego and the ego’s use of the pain-body is one of the main subjects Tolle discusses in A New Earth.
Further reading:
A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, Eckhart Tolle, A Plume Book, Penguin Books Ltd., A Namaste Publishing Book, 2006, 315 pages
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