Help Yourself To The Smorgasbord of Life
Go ahead and fill your plate at the smorgasbord of life. The amount of material available to anyone who wants a better existence has never been larger. Self-help books keep multiplying at a wild rate. People are poking around in the spiritual world too, sometimes the tradition they were handed at birth, sometimes one they picked up later on their own. Not so long ago this sort of material was kept out of reach, or ordinary people were warned off from chasing it by themselves.
Learning how the universe works gives you a better shot at bringing into being whatever you want, for yourself or for someone else. And yet you'll catch people muttering "I can't help myself" when someone asks why they're stuck, or why they can't name what they actually want from their years here.
Everything we know rests on what came before it, absorbed and made our own. When a new discovery pulls someone toward unfamiliar ground, a quiet bell seems to go off in the head, often confirming a hunch or a belief the person had already been turning over.
At this buffet you take only what you need and reach for whichever dish happens to be calling you. Put me in front of an actual smorgasbord and I might load up on herring in sour cream or wine sauce. You might refuse to let it near your plate, maybe even recoil from it. One caution: when the dish tempting you would mean harming yourself or another person, leave it where it is.
Modern psychology keeps turning out fresh methods for getting to know yourself. Meditation and mindfulness are two of them. Relaxation work and hypnosis are older entries on the menu. The question is whether such tools belong only to people in real psychological trouble, or whether we ought to be handing them to everyone so they feel better and do well in life. When the pupil is ready the teacher shows up. Stay grounded about it and track down a trustworthy, properly trained practitioner.
Some things in psychology have now been confirmed scientifically that we either didn't realize were possible or couldn't demonstrate even when we suspected them. Take the crystals that form when water freezes: their shape was influenced by whether the words labeling the containers were positive or negative, by the vibration those words carried. Positive words produced beautiful, well-made crystals under the microscope. Negative words did the reverse, and the water struggled, nearly failing, to form any stable crystal at all.
It's a bit of a disgrace that psychology as a science has figured out so much about raising people from infancy to adulthood with fewer troubles in how they act, think, and relate, and yet we barely use it. In the name of freedom, nobody gets to interfere with how and why children are conceived, who gets to have them, or the way they're brought up.
Plenty of children grow up with parents who model behavior badly, in circumstances that are far from ideal, which gets worse when the parents or caregivers won't spend what they have (time? money?) on the kids. Problems can surface and the parents can simply decide to do nothing. Years later, in the therapist's office, consider how much of adult treatment goes to unwinding what was done wrong back in childhood.
The feel of a home carries weight. Children, even infants, pick up on it when an adult's words, face, body, and gestures don't line up. The adult who gets caught at this will usually tell the child who noticed that they've got it wrong, because the last thing that adult wants is for the child to stop trusting them.
The resources exist and they turn up in a lot of places. They come from people, and from communities of people, who share a respect for all life, a drive to do the most good for the greatest number of living things, and love held out to everything.