Even the worse experiences in the world can teach you something. Sometimes, however, even the best experiences in the world cannot teach you because you are not ready, and you have not prepared yourself. You should work with yourselves constantly, and remember that you are working with yourself.

You should develop thirty goals for thirty days, and pick one goal for each day. Practice this yourself, it is a very simple thing. For example, you may decide that today you are not going to lie. That does not mean that you will redouble your lies tomorrow, but rather, that today your whole thinking process is about this: that you are not going to lie. You never claim that you will be able to speak the total Truth, but simply decide that you are not going to consciously lie.

Then, the next day, you may resolve, “I will not be unkind to anyone,” and the day that you decide to do that, everything challenging will come to you. You decide, “I will not lie,” and suddenly many occasions will present themselves that you could lie. This happens because you are trying to conquer your nature, the part of your nature that you have built unconsciously for a long time. All your actions in life have unconscious results, as if you are digging a hole and therefore making a heap of dirt somewhere else, but you do not understand that. Suddenly, when you stop digging the hole, you discover that you have created both a heap and a hole.

The day that you resolve, “I will love everyone and not hate anyone today,” you will find that all your enemies are coming to you. They come via telephone calls, or in letters, or you may hear someone talking about you. Once, when I was young, this happened to me and I became very upset. Someone had written something very nasty to me, and my Master noticed and asked me what has happened to me. He used to tell me that I was like mercury, so he called me “Thermometer.” He said, “Thermometer, what has happened?”

I said, “Look at this nasty letter.”

He replied, “Do you want to become more nasty yourself by replying to it in a nasty way? That is not the way to deal with it; read the letter six times, and eventually you will not find anything nasty in it.” And that happened: I read, reread, and reread the letter again, and my Master told me not to reply to it immediately, so I waited, and then six days later I replied to it very calmly.

When you become accustomed to witnessing certain things in yourself, you may still feel bad, but you do not feel so very bad, and if something good happens, then you do not feel so incredibly good. You can develop the habit of being more balanced, or of losing your destructive sensitivity and reactivity to both positive and negative things.

If you adopt thirty points to work on for thirty days, mark them on your calendar and do not tell anyone what you are doing. Just watch the calendar, and see what you have accomplished in thirty days’ time. The point is not, for instance, whether you have lied or not lied: it is that you have built your willpower. This is the real process of building willpower. After thirty days, you will conclude, “Yes, I have done what I wanted to do.” But do not choose big principles that you cannot fulfill –that is destructive. Instead, select little things.

If you decide that for one day you will speak very little – only that which is accurate, purposeful, and non-hurting, you may continue to talk to everyone, but in setting this goal you will be building your willpower. After you develop willpower, you will have greater self-confidence.

Editor’s Note

This is an excerpt from ‘The Art of Joyful Living‘ by Swami Rama. Chapter “Developing Strength and Will power. ” Pages 128 – 129 in the 1989 edition.

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