When you are in a state of fear and upset, you destroy your ability to see what needs to be done. You close down and get tunnel vision. All you can do is to fight, resist, hang on, or withdraw. Almost any action you take in this state makes your situation worse.

Upsets seem to be caused by what happens, but they're not. This is just an illusion. Upsets are not caused by what happens. Upsets are caused by fighting and resisting what happens.

To see this in your life, select a recent upset. Now notice what would happen to the upset if, somehow, you were totally at peace with what happened. There would be no upset. There would be no upset, because the upset wasn't caused by what happened. The upset was caused by fighting and resisting what happened.

The moment you take away the fighting and resisting, the upset disappears. You restore both your peace of mind and your effectiveness.

Now notice what would happen if someone spilled a glass of water on you. You would be wet and you would be wet no matter how you felt about it. Your feelings would be totally irrelevant. You would still be wet.

If you are at peace with being wet, there would be no upset and you would have peace of mind. If you fought being wet, you would be upset. And the more you fought being wet, the more upset you would be,

When you get upset, it’s not because of the circumstances. It's because you are fighting and resisting your circumstances. Nothing has the ability to create an upset inside you. Only you can do that.

So why do we fight and resist what happens? We fight what happens, because our circumstances trigger a suppressed hurt from the past. To say this another way, our circumstances strike a nerve.

This is why different people get upset at different things. Each person has different set of nerves that get triggered. This is also why the same type of upsets and the same self-sabotaging behavior keep showing up in your life. The same suppressed hurt keeps getting triggered.

It's the automatic, subconscious avoidance of this hurt that sabotages our lives. Finding and healing this hurt is one of the most important things you can ever do.

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