Boost your mood -- the easy way

Hello there, this is Mary Schiller coming to you live from— not from Paris as it might look in the background, but from New York City. And I'd like to welcome you to this short live video called Boost Your Mood on this Friday, Earth Day. And my website is thedailyprinciples.com if you'd like to find me after this broadcast. And if you're watching this on the recording, I really appreciate you being here as well. So I was thinking today about how my mother used to talk to me when I was in a low mood. If I was sad or if something had upset me, oftentimes she would say, "Mary, this too shall pass." So have you ever heard that before? I'm guessing maybe you have. What I thought she meant by that was that whatever the thing was that was upsetting me would eventually change. For example, if I had an argument with my best friend and she was angry with me and I was feeling upset about it, I would hear my mother say, "This too shall pass," and I think, "Okay, well, eventually she won't be mad at me anymore. And, you know, then I won't be upset anymore either. And I pretty much stuck with that perspective my whole life up until a couple of years ago, where it really looked to me like things that happened out there in the world affected me, created some feelings in me, and the things that other people did affected me, created some feelings in me, and that the way those feelings changed was if the circumstance changed or if the person's reaction to me changed. And I was missing a very important piece of that picture, which is that no matter what is going on out there, the only thing that is ever changing, the only thing that's ever fluctuating, has nothing to do with those people out there or those events out there, and everything to do with my thoughts, my own thinking. So if I look back at what my mother said about this too shall pass, I wish she had said this thought will pass. Because that's much more accurate a description of what's really going on. So when I'm now feeling like I'm in a low mood, if I'm upset or I'm feeling a little sad or frustrated or stressed or anything like that, I can now see that the only thing that has to change for my mood to change is I simply need to get some fresh thinking coming in there. Now, when I first started to look at this more closely, I thought, well, maybe the answer is that I'm supposed to think differently about something. So I tried to kind of change my thinking around. So something would occur and I would feel negatively about it. I'd have some kind of strong negative feeling. And I think, oh, all right, what I need to do then is I need to change my mindset about this. I need to think more positively about it. I need to get a whole new frame of reference for this thing that I'm thinking about, and then I'll feel better. But that really didn't work very well for me because I didn't seem to be able to control what my thoughts were. Everybody kept saying that I should be able to do that. And it just never happened. So over time, I started to see something else, which was that I didn't need to change my thinking about something in order to feel better. All I had to do was see that my thinking was creating that feeling I was having. And it didn't always work, and it doesn't always work instantly, instantly, but what does happen is when I see that I've got thinking going on, the thinking itself that's creating that low mood in me starts to not look quite so solid. It starts to look a little bit more transparent. So I'll give you an idea of what I'm talking about. So since I write a lot, I can get in a pretty low mood when I'm writing if things are not going well. If I'm struggling to come up with good ideas, or this week, for example, I've been working on a book and I got very stuck at one point and just didn't know what to do, and I was feeling pretty frustrated. And I noticed that my thoughts were things like, "Mary, you should just quit." "Mary, just quit writing this book. What are you doing, Mary? You don't know what to say. Nobody's going to read it anyway. What do you think you're doing?" I think in the past, before I had the understanding that I now teach people with these 3 principles, I would have bought into it. I would have listened to those thoughts and I would have said, "Yeah, that's true. Nobody's going to read this and I don't know what I'm doing." So I should just quit. And I would have kind of got sucked down into that tunnel, and then my whole day might have been ruined, my whole week might have been ruined, because I was kind of embroiled in all that thinking. But what happened this week, whenever I would have those kinds of thoughts pop up, I would just kind of look at them and go, wow, is that really true? Is that— just because that's in my head, does that mean it's actually true? And they started to look kind of funny to me after a while. I started noticing that they would pop into my mind about 5 or 10 minutes into my writing session. I would have a thought like, what are you doing? Like, you have no idea how to write this. Who's gonna— who's gonna care? And I And I started to see them kind of just float in. And I would go, ah, there they are again. That's so funny how that happens, like 5 or 10 minutes into my writing session. And I started to see very clearly that in this example in particular, the thinking I was having had nothing to do with my abilities or with what I was producing. They were simply thoughts that were just coming in right then that I didn't need to listen to or give any credence to whatsoever. I really love this piece of understanding because it gives so much hope to me when I'm feeling in a low mood because I realize that nothing on the outside of me has to change for me to have a better experience. Experience. So if I get into an argument with someone, if I'm having a rough time at work, if I'm, you know, experiencing some mood that I really, really don't like, I can see so clearly most of the time— sometimes I get tricked, but I'm getting better at seeing through the illusion— I can see that the The job doesn't need to change for me to feel better. The person who I had the argument with doesn't need to change to make me feel better. Nothing has to change to make me feel better except a new thought needs to come in. And I think it's really sometimes kind of hard for people to grasp, and it was for me in the beginning of this understanding as well, that there isn't anything we have to do to get new thinking. The only thing that's required is an awareness that we are living in the feeling of our thinking all the time. We are never experiencing anything out there, even when it looks that way. We're always feeling what's going on in here. With that awareness, we can really feel a tremendous amount of freedom from having to control things in our lives, having to control people. Jeff says it's like having a life preserver to grab onto, and I totally understand that because I remember before I had this understanding of these principles that I talked to people about, I really felt hopeless and kind of helpless a lot of the time. You know, I would go to my job and I wouldn't really like the feeling I had there, and I kept thinking, well, the boss isn't going to change, and so it must mean that I've just got to jump ship from this job in order to feel better. And I had lots of instances like that throughout my life where it looked like the only solution was changing something in my environment or or hoping that some person would leave my life or something like that. And instead, I feel such an incredible spaciousness inside now because I know that even in my worst moments, when I'm feeling the most down, I know that it's not reflecting anything about my actual life. It's only reflecting a momentary thought or series of thoughts that I'm having. Another thing that I think is really key, and this has just become clearer to me lately, is that I used to kind of then look at my thinking as something to be afraid of because I thought, okay, if all of my experience and my feelings are coming from my thoughts, then if I have scary thoughts, you know, I'm gonna have a scary experience and I don't want that. And I think what's becoming more obvious to me now is that I don't need to be afraid of any experience that I have because it's only coming from within me. And what's beneath our thoughts is our actual selves. I no longer see myself in my thinking. I see a wider and wider gulf between what thoughts flow through my mind all the time and my actual self that is fully functional, fully creative, wise beyond anything we could ever hope for. And I've stopped identifying myself with whatever thoughts are floating through my mind because they aren't who we are. I think that we are kind of brought up to believe that, that, you know, what we think reflects who we are. But the more you look in this direction, the more you'll start to see that they're just completely random, that there's so much more to us than that little flutter of staticky thinking that we experience every day that creates these moods that we experience. And I've also now come to appreciate the ups and the downs because I feel like with this understanding we can have this full experience of what it means to be a human being, to have these incredible highs and joys and have these incredible lows like, you know, grief and all of the depth of feeling that is, and we can enjoy all of that because we know exactly where it's coming from, and we know that what's underneath that is steady and unchanging and completely beautiful and untouched by anything that's going on out here. So I'd like to just leave you with one last comment, which is if you can start to see that the only thing that has to change for your mood to change is your thinking, because that's where your mood is coming from, it's a lot easier to look at your thoughts from the perspective of, oh, you know, they're just creating my moment-to-moment experience. They're not telling me anything that I need to really listen to. They're just there to allow me to be in this human being state and have this incredible experience that we've been given. It's a true gift, and I now see my emotions, no matter what they are, as a true gift. So I hope that this has been helpful to you. If you'd like to get in touch with me directly, you can always find me on this page or come over to my website thedailyprinciples.com. Thank you so much for being here, everybody. Bye now.