by Sister Jacqueline Russell from Brahma Kumaris Centre for Spiritual Learning
The kind of love that gives respect to all things without conditions is the foundation of life and it has within it a sense of hope.
A hope that the goodness that exists in everyone will emerge and carry us forward.
The stage of being resilient is to accept that the situation we are faced with is as it is and then to adopt an attitude of changing our feelings towards it.
Feelings of hopelessness will not achieve our goals.
Maintaining a feeling of hope will certainly move us into thinking differently about the situation.
The same principle applies in a relationship where we may feel a victim.
While we must be careful to maintain our physical safety, what about safety in our consciousness?
What am I thinking?
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that what I think becomes what I will say and do, so when I keep the awareness that what I think shapes my attitude, my character, and my actions, then I will pay attention to my thoughts.
How to do this. One thing is to be careful what I translate from my hearing, my seeing, and my absorbing of the news that surrounds us every day.
There is so much information to absorb.
However, when I can pay less attention to absorbing what I am observing then I will retain less and so not to clog my mind with so much thought.
Overthinking about anything is to create waste products in my mind.
Someone once described a waste thought as being like a sandwich left in the fridge for a week or two and if eaten it would not provide much nutrition.
So it is with my thoughts, for by my going over and over again in my thoughts some hurt, an experience, a conversation, it is certainly not providing any nutrition for my mind.
If what I think creates my state of consciousness, my attitude and ultimately my happiness, then changing the way I think is the method to maintain hope and contribute to the universal goodness.
It is more a reality rather than a hope that there is a universal goodness in humanity, and we see evidence of it in many stories of the expressions of compassion towards situations of need.
Let us keep these in our minds to counteract their opposite and so in times of disheartenment we may draw upon them and maintain our hope and the kind of love that gives respect to all.
