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The weather is so good today! The sun finally comes out after weeks of rain. I decided to keep the window wide open as I can use an extra dosage of fresh air…

Then… within minutes, I have two unexpected guests – bees!

I am not sure if it is because the irresistable scent from this big plot of flowers next to the window or the fact that these poor little creatures have been starving for a while (no work during rainy days!), these bees joyfully entered my apartment through the windows…. until the found out that they cannot get out of the window– they don’t understand why they cannot get pass this invisible wall (the transparent glass) which separate them from the beautiful world outside.

Well, it’s time for me to release life again… I told myself. Then I got told of a piece of soft peacook weather (which I brought for this specific purpose!) to gentle guide and lead the bees towards the open window, hoping that they can regain their freedom…

As much as I wish, despite my greatest sincere efforts, only one bee managed to follow my “guidance” and free itself, while the other one has been stubbornly ignoring my signalling and kept bumping against the glass window, with hope that it can break free…until it was exhausted to death…

I cannot help but wonder, are we like this bee sometime? There are so many friends, families, therapists and even the forces from the universe that want to help and support us during difficult time, but have we been blind to this? Instead of letting go and following the guidance, we stubbornly stick to our limiting beliefs and unresourceful thinking pattern….and continue to struggle.

It is so important to stop resisting and start allowing sometime, as the western idiom says “Let go and let God”… only then can we truey discover and open ourselves up to receive the support from others and the universe… this may even be the moment that miracle can happen…

This is one of my favourite parable that Buddha told in sutra:

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.

Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

It is very normal for us to think about the past and worry about the future… and we need to constantly remind ourselves of the wonder of life at this moment…here and now, and nowhere else…

When a traveler arrives at a hotel, he negotiates a price for a room and informs the staff of how long he will be staying. But as he gets comfortable there, he may begin to feel like the hotel is his home, and after a while he forgets about moving on. When the management tells him that he must give up the room, he refuses to leave. “This is where I live! Why should I leave?” There is some misunderstanding, and it leads to strife.

When we start to identify with our bodies and minds and think of this life as ours, then we are similar to the traveler who doesn’t want to leave the hotel. We have a wrong idea about this temporary stopping place, and we find ourselves always in struggle and conflict.

? Ajahn Chah, from Being Dharma

Every negative emotion has it benefit and function, almost all therapists and counselors would agree on this statement. The issue is, how do we allow the negative emotion assist us, and to what extent do we allow our mind to be occupied and controlled by it…

Everyone of us is affected by one of these common negative emotions to a varying degree – anger, sadness, fear, hurt and guilt. To me, fear and worry is the predominant one. Growing up, I spent lots of time worry about small things, such as if I get the perfect answer in an exam, if my boyfriend is interested in the girl sitting next to us in the cinema, or if my hair looks good today.

With some personal development tool, I am able to identify the source of such a pattern, and I am able deal with it constructively. However, the old pattern may be triggered (by the bad economy and general negativity nowadays) and returns momentarily, under such circumstances, the best way to deal with it is through mindfulness –to bring our awareness back to the present moment.

The Vietnamese Buddhist monk and philosopher Thich Nhat Hanh, writes about enjoying a cup of tea : We must be completely awake in the present to enjoy the tea, only then can we really feel the pleasant warmth of the tea cup, the aroma and taste of the tea. If we are ruminating about the past and worrying about the future, you will completely miss the experience of enjoying the tea. You will look down into the cup, and the tea is gone before you know it.

The past is gone, and the future is yet to come. Plan on it, but don’t waste time worrying about it. Worrying is worthless. When you stop ruminating about the past and worrying about what might never happen, then you will be in the present moment. You will begin to experience the joy of life.

A client of my Ultimate Breakthrough Program would like to deal with the self sabotage pattern. She is smart and highly educated, yet she always ended up taking a mediocre job that didn’t pay what she deserved. She was also not able to hold a job for more than a year or so. She wanted a change.

“My mum never compliment me once in my life… instead, she finds every opportunity to criticize and make me feel bad!” she complained at the beginning of the session. Through the session, she realized there is a pattern of self sabotage as a revenge to her own mother “ You think I am not good then I just prove it to you…you should be happy about it right?!” her inner child said.

Sometime it’s hard to imagine how powerful our unconscious mind is, no matter it is driving us towards the resourceful behaviours or the destructive ones. Being rejected as a child has a profound impact on us, and the effect lasts until when we have grown up. The negative emotion and hurtful feeling maybe trapped deep in our psyche, which resulted in our belief that the world is a hostile place and that we need to fight. Sometime the rejection may lead to something worse - the rejection of ourselves.

I think many of us can relate to this. In our culture, parents seldom praise the children, and they believe that being demanding is the best way of parenting. What we need to do is to recognize this pattern and it source. Only then we can forgive our parents, heal the inner child, let go of the past and walk out of the shadow. The true maturity and personal power is the result of such a realization and taking responsibility of our lives.