The last couple of weeks, my family and I have been dealing with some difficult circumstances involving one of our puppies.  Death has lurked around the corner and whispered through the halls of the veterinary hospital on more than one occasion.  There have been plenty of thoughts, words, and feelings of grief, sadness, worry, fear, and even anger during this time.

Yet hidden within all of it has been a powerful lesson for me.  It's a lesson that has me realizing that, in one way or another, we're all control freaks, and that our need for control is one of the greatest sources of suffering in life.

This is nothing new.  The Buddha taught in the Four Noble Truths that happiness comes to those who are able to let go of desires for things they do not have.  As humans, we often associate desire with material things: a job, a car, a new purse, more money.  But the other side of that coin is the desire for our circumstances, our relationships, or the events unfolding around us to be something other than what they are.

Sometimes we can change those circumstances.  Sometimes we can't.

The hardest experiences in life are often the ones beyond our control: a layoff, the illness of a loved one, the death of a family member, friend, or pet, or a personal health challenge that pushes us to our edge.  When these situations arrive at our doorstep, suffering often follows close behind.

But what if it didn't have to?

From a Pranic Healing perspective, emotions are energy.  Grief, fear, anger, and sadness are not inherently bad.  They are natural responses to difficult experiences.  The challenge comes when we allow those energies to take over completely and become the director of everything else in our lives.

The goal is not to suppress our emotions or pretend they don't exist.  It is to feel them without becoming them.

It is to feel sadness while still allowing room for gratitude.  Fear while still making space for faith.  Anger while still choosing love.  We must learn to hold difficult emotions the way we would hold a small child, with care, patience, and compassion, while also making room for the healing emotions that help us move forward.

Master Choa Kok Sui often taught that inner peace is not the absence of problems.  It is the ability to remain centered in the middle of them.

When we stop allowing difficult emotions to take the wheel, we often become better equipped to help ourselves and the people we love.  We think more clearly.  We act more effectively.  We suffer less unnecessarily.

Yet many of us spend our lives trying to control everything around us.  We carefully arrange our circumstances for comfort, ease, and predictability, then become devastated when life refuses to cooperate.  We look outward and say, "As long as everything stays this way, I'll be okay."

As the saying goes, "If you want to hear God laugh, make plans."

We are not in control of everything, and perhaps that's a gift. The sooner we make peace with that reality, the sooner we can begin living fully in each day rather than waiting for life to become perfect before allowing ourselves to be happy.  There is no such thing as bad weather, only the perspective through which we experience it.  When we learn to view our circumstances through the same lens, finding gratitude, meaning, and even growth in whatever arrives, our happiness becomes much harder to compromise.

And perhaps that is the real lesson.  Life was never asking us to control the waves.  It was asking us to learn how to ride them.

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