Powerful Peace Blog

In our last post, we were talking about whether we should just accept the societal and cultural LISTs regarding what is good or bad for us.  The challenge of accepting LISTs created by others is that we have disempowered ourselves and our ability to choose how to feel. 

This series of posts is an attempt to bring our awareness to the fact that we each have LISTs, to understand where they came from, to figure out what is even on our LISTs, and to determine how we can change them.

We’ve established the idea that we all have LISTs containing what we’ve determined is good or bad for us and others.  We have shown that some things we think are bad, others may think are good.  We’ve talked about some things that generally everyone thinks are bad and discussed the possibility that over time, profound good may emerge from those same ‘bad’ things.

Before exploring further about LISTs, I’d like to discuss a very critical point regarding our language and how we use it to deny any responsibility...

In Part I of this series of posts, we ended with the following:

Many times, there are things on our LISTs of what we consider to be good or bad that are only there because they are generally accepted culturally and socially.  But does it make sense to allow those around us to be able to decide what gets to be on our LIST? 

Stop and think about who gets to add to or take from your personal LISTs!

We were talking about the LISTs we have created in our lives.  We each have a LIST of the things that make us feel good.  We each have a LIST of the things that make us feel bad.

Two things here. 

1. Does it make sense to just keep accepting the culturally governed ways we are supposed to feel when certain things happen?
2. Does it make sense to believe that because a certain event happens, it has the power to ‘make’ us feel something, especially something we may not enjoy feeling?

There is a Chinese Proverb that goes something like this…

A farmer and his son had a beloved stallion who he...