The art of resigning your way to peace and productivity

What happens when you stop pushing your way to feeling good and getting things done

No matter how much you learn about how to create more happiness and success in your life, I guarantee you this: you will still have unhappy moments.

I have experienced more peace and well-being in recent years than I have probably since I was a kid. Even so, bad days happen. We all still have our stress triggers.

A few years ago, my answer to a bad feeling would have been to spin my feelings backwards, push pictures around in my head and force my low feelings into submission with huge force of deliberately created positive feelings. Not today, though. It's not that it doesn't work, it's that on some level, it feels at odds with something. Maybe that something is our innate nature.

What I know now runs counter to how I was taught in the you must take control of you brain! paradigm. The best way to return to well-being is to do nothing. Yes, nothing. There is an art to doing nothing, however, because we seem to have this in-built tendency to want to do something, perhaps driven by a thought that we should be doing something.

By the way, don't mistake "doing nothing" with "dwelling on the bad feeling". Dwelling on anything is still doing. Doing nothing really is about doing nothing—nothing to either maintain the old feeling or to try and force a new one.

When you resign from trying to control your experience there's a return to peace that happens all by itself. It's like the process is in-built if you don't get in the way. It's easy and there's no sense of being at odds with anything. It's not a feeling of power or ecstasy. It's a feeling of peace and clarity from which new thinking and new feeling emerges.

I have started days thinking I couldn't face any of the tasks of the day. Days where I couldn't see the truth of the things I teach. When I have such days, if I's mindful enough to resign completely, peace and well-being started to return. I start to see my "problems" anew and I started to feel inspired to do things again.

I know it's not that I won't ever feel low again. It's not that the stress triggers will never fire again. It's just that the return to peace is always available.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.