Understand Your Power

A very good friend of mine works in the education sector.

She is perfectly suited to the work as she is extremely wise and patient.

They are both traits I have associated with her since I first met her, and she embodied them even then, during our misspent youth!

One of the wisdoms she shares with her students is that you can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to it.

I have always loved that counsel.

It is attributed to the renowned Stoic, Epictetus.

“It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”

― Epictetus

At first, it offers comfort through an acknowledgement of damage inflicted or bad luck.

But on deeper analysis, the wisdom of those words frees you from hurt from any event that occurs, no matter how severe.

You alone are responsible for your thoughts, words and deeds.

So you may choose the person you want to be.

Choose how you respond and how the event impacts you.

No matter what has happened to you.

In his book, How to Practice, The Way to a Meaningful Life, His Holiness the Dalai Lama gives an example of just this.

He recalls a conversation with a monk who had spent 18 years in a Chinese Communist gulag.

The monk said he had faced danger on a few occasions.

But the danger he referred to was not any ill treatment he had endured, it was the danger of losing compassion towards the Chinese people, as a result of his incarceration.

Losing his compassion towards others was his greatest concern.

Don’t mirror your hurt and inflict harm on yourself or others.

You alone are responsible for your thoughts, words and deeds.

“While others may have power over your circumstance, you alone have power over you.”