Upsets are never caused by what happens

When you get upset, you close down inside. You get tunnel vision and lose your ability to see clearly. All you can do is fight, resist, hang on and withdraw. You destroy love and make your situation worse. Upsets are very destructive.

If you could be free of your upsets, you would be very effective. You would see life clearly and could see what needs to be done. The first step in accomplishing this is to discover that upsets are not caused by what happens. They are caused by fighting what happens.

To see this in your life, find a time when you were upset. Didn’t something happen? Didn’t it happen no matter how you felt about it?

Notice how irrelevant your feelings were. It still happened. Now notice what would happen to the upset if somehow, you were totally at peace with what happened. There would be no upset. The moment you take away the resisting, the upset disappears.

Here is another example. Notice what would happen if I spilled a glass of water on you. You would be wet and you would be wet whether you liked it or not. Being wet is like the circumstances of your life. Something happened and your feelings about it don’t
change a thing. You are still wet.

If you are at peace with the truth of being wet, you will have peace of mind and will be very effective in handling your situation. If you fight the truth of being wet, you will be upset,
and the more you fight being wet, the more upset you will be.

Whether you have peace or upset, you are still wet. Your state of mind has nothing to do with your circumstances. Your state of mind depends solely on whether you are at peace with the truth or fighting it.

When you surrender to the truth of the way your situation is, you restore both your peace of mind and your effectiveness. You see your situation clearly and can see what needs to be done. Instead of resisting and making your situation worse, you can put your focus on finding solutions.

We fight the truth because the truth strikes a nerve. It reactivates a suppressed hurt from the past. We’ll talk more about this later.