Our media often shows us glamorized images whereby we worry about how slim, smart or fluent we are. Naturally, we often feel deficient and become discouraged. 

To avoid such discouragement, we need to gain a more holistic vision of ourselves. We all have certain weaknesses, but we also have certain strengths. Unfortunately, by comparing ourselves with digitally doctored versions of abilities in the media, we end up compounding our weaknesses with our weakened spirit. 

To focus on our strengths, we need to discipline our mind. The Bhagavad-gita (17.16) states that we all need to cultivate cheerfulness as a mental discipline. And cultivating cheerfulness means we need to consciously choose to focus on those things that help us stay cheerful and avoid obsessing over the things that make us depressed

For stimulating such a positive focus, a spiritual worldview reveals us our greatest strength: beyond our weaknesses, we all are parts of the Divine, we are all significant and we are provided for by the Divine. That means whatever challenges we face in life, if we strive with a mood of service, we can find out how best we can contribute. We can gain the inner calmness and clarity and confidence to discern and develop our latent strengths, and to manage and minimize our weaknesses. 

Thus by focusing on how we are blessed by our strengths rather than how we are cursed by our weakness, we can transform our life into a blessing that is an opportunity for us to do good in the world and to move toward our Lord, who is the source of all blessings and who is himself the ultimate blessing.

One-sentence summary:

Focus on how you are blessed by your strengths, not on how you are cursed by your weaknesses.

Think it over:

  • How might we compound our weaknesses?
  • What mental discipline can help us in bringing out our best?
  • How can a spiritual worldview help us focus on positives?

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17.16: And satisfaction, simplicity, gravity, self-control and purification of one’s existence are the austerities of the mind.

 

To know more about this verse, please click on the image