Our society is obsessed with reducing or avoiding pain and suffering, whether it’s physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual. Yet putting our energy into avoiding something doesn’t bring what we want. Do people really get well by all the attention paid to sickness and medications? We will perpetuate what we focus on, especially when we do it obsessively.  We attract to ourselves what we fear, especially when we don't acknowledge the fear. The more emotional energy we put into what we fear--we really are putting more energy into what we don’t want--the more we bring it about.

I suggest that it is far better for us simply to acknowlege our fears and then to focus on what we want to bring about. Paul Pearsall said it well: it is not stress that is the problem today; it is lack of joy. We can handle anything when there is joy.  Victor Frankl said a similar thing ages ago: we can survive anything if we have a sense of meaning. Certainly stress is a huge problem for our society but cultivating a joyful heart would be the best antidote.

Generally it would be agreed that we want less pain, fear and suffering, and more joy, happiness, affection and pleasure in living. We want peace of mind. How do we have more of the joy and pleasure of living: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual? Where is the key to more joy? Is it not in enhanced self-awareness, self-trust and self-acceptance that our life becomes more exciting and interesting?

I am talking about absolute response-ability in the moment of the event. As long as we stay in the moment, we can respond with our best interests at heart, rather than react. Reacting means going into emotional stress overwhelm and just repeating old behaviour patterns. With Three In One Concepts' "One Brain System" we can clear up the old reaction patterns. Then we stay in the moment of the event more of the time. Then we are absolutely response-able more of the time. And we are free and joyful, more of the time.

Joy is only in present time. Fear takes us into the past, and our memories of painful experiences create fear of more suffering to come. We are caught up in avoiding more of the painful feelings. Anxiousness takes us into a fantasy of possible or likely insecurities and suffering in the future, based on fears from the past. Both fear and anxiousness keep us in addictive thoughts and behaviours that maintain expectations of failure and suffering and make present joy impossible.

We have needs, desires and, sometimes, obsessions. When we satisfy our needs they cease to exist: hunger is the need for food; thirst is the need for water. When we satisfy desires they increase. The more we surrender to our desires the more they grow. Give in to the desire for beauty, for truth, for affection, for whatever is truly life-giving. We need to create images and feelings about what we truly desire, for they will generate the energy for the action that brings about what we want. What we think, with lots of feeling, is what we get. Desire or fear creates the feeling that brings us what we believe and think.

Desires are different from obsessions. Obsessions are anxious, insecure, fearful and they are based in self-doubt. They are needs out of control that take control of us and we have no choice. On the other hand, we choose to surrender to desires. We choose what desires to cultivate. We create our spirit by the desires we choose to cultivate.

Early in life we learned to believe what we were told to believe. We learned not to trust our own knowing. We learned to live in self-doubt and to rely on others for “ the knowledge of good and evil”. We even inherited our parents’ and society’s self-doubt. That’s the original sin we inherited: self-doubt. From then on we lived too much in self-doubt and relied too much on what we were told to believe, and self-doubt infected all our choices.

We learned the language of the impossible. It applies to specific situations and relationships, and can apply to much of our life. It goes like this: “In this situation or relationship I can never have the (X) that I want; I will always end up with the (Y) that I don’t want.” This becomes an unconscious program that runs our lives when we are in stress. It can also be a conscious program that we accept as inevitable. It translates as:  "I can’t have the joy, enjoyment, pleasure of living, the meaningful life that I want; instead, I get the pain, misery, suffering, confusion and meaninglessness  I don’t want."  In childhood we set up a number of such negative expectations. We may say: “well I don’t feel as bad as that sounds,” but these patterns of expectation apply in some areas of our lives, when stress and self-doubt overwhelm us.