By Amanda Enayati — 2012
Columnist Amanda Enayati ponders the theme of seeking serenity, the quest for well-being, and life balance in stressful times.
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CLEAR ALL
The most popular course at Yale teaches how to be happy. We took it for you.
The ongoing dialogue I have with my own perspective and emotions is the biggest job I’ve ever undertaken. Exploring this internal give-and-take forces me to grow in surprising ways.
A few months and many deaths ago, I woke up exhausted, again. Every morning, I felt like I was rebuilding myself from the ground up. Waking up was hard. Getting to my desk to write was hard. Taking care of my body was hard. Remembering the point of it all was hard.
If you ever find yourself thinking “I don’t know who I am,” you might wonder why you might feel this way and what you can do to change that.
An identity crisis is a developmental event that involves a person questioning their sense of self or place in the world.
Whether you’re questioning your identity or just haven’t taken the time to develop your own identity to begin with, getting to know you is an important part of living a full and happy life. Here are some helpful tips to get to know yourself.
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It’s surprisingly easy to achieve lasting happiness — we just have to understand our own basic nature. The hard part, says Mingyur Rinpoche, is getting over our bad habit of seeking happiness in transient experiences.
Don’t take anything personally. This agreement gives you immunity in the interaction you have with the secondary characters in your story. You don’t have to concern yourself with other people’s points of view.
Everything in our lives reflects where we are in the process of developing integration and balance.
Throughout life, we constantly narrate, or commentate on, everything we do, say, see, touch, smell, taste, and hear. As natural storytellers, we continuously keep the plot moving forward, sometimes missing millions of subplots that are developing on their own.