Have you ever been stuck in traffic, slowly getting frustrated, and then your favorite song comes on the radio and as you sing along, you find that traffic isn’t so bad after all?
Or maybe, you’re working on a prickly project and the more you work on it, the more tangled it becomes. Then, starting to think you ought to give up, you find the thread that helps you solve the problem. The project then becomes a breeze.
In both these scenarios, we’ve all experienced the down sides. Getting so frustrated with moving nowhere in traffic we become enraged and mean. When working on a tough project, giving up because we just can’t work it out. When we let tough situations get to us, we are giving into our Lower Selves, but when we make the best of the situation, when we don’t give up, we are connecting to our Higher Selves.
As Susan wrote in End the Struggle and Dance With Life, “For the skeptics out there, I know the concept of the Higher Self and Lower Self may be hard to accept. If you are one of them, I ask you to scan the events of your own life. As you do, you will realize that there were moments when everything was a struggle and fear dominated your emotions. There were other moments when everything seemed to flow and you were at peace. I am simply identifying the former moments as ‘Lower Self moments’ and the latter as ‘Higher Self moments.’
To learn to “Dance With Life,” we need to work on making more of our moments “Higher Self Moments.” And, we need to do this no matter how crazy and chaotic the outside world is. We need to connect with the Laughing Buddha to learn to not take ourselves too seriously and to find the way to joy in everything in order to live our best lives.