A Journey Towards Contentment: Applying

I set out to be content. Enter daily life. A beautifully challenging teenage daughter. A marriage. A huge redecorating project that I had volunteered for with a deadline. A  beautifully challenging teenager now with a broken collar bone and pretty cranky. Financial challenges. A broken car (again). etc. etc. This is going to take A LOT of practice, this contentment thing.

To begin with, I decided to assign myself a mantra…”be content.”  I repeated this mantra daily, hourly, sometimes each minute to remind myself.  I liked this mantra.  We have become friends.  It helped to a certain extent.  I began offering my yoga practices to contentment.  This was a nice reminder also.  When I visited the Gong Bath, I sought out a crystal that would help with contentment.  Each morning, after my meditation, I would read over the yamas and contemplate how I can do things to live this knowledge.  All of these practices seemed to help me with becoming more content each day.

I did find, however, that when the going got really tough, like people dropping the ball with not doing what they were supposed to on my redecorating project, or my teenager not eating appropriately, or my husband not doing what “I” think is the “right” thing,  or my car breaking down for the eighth time, etc. etc.,  that my little mantra was challenged. “How can I be content in a situation like this?” Then one day, in the middle of waiting for someone who was 45 minutes late and I had a boat-load of things to do, I had another one of those ah ha moments. Contentment = dropping control. Stop – Drop – Control.  Kind of like that thing you were taught as a kid if you catch on fire. Pretty much the same concept too.  The more you run and struggle with the fire(control), the hotter and larger it will get and the more extensive the damage. So a second bouncing baby mantra was born to me, “drop control.”