Being Content

What is it to be content, or find contentment?

A number of questions spring; Is it internally or externally gained? Is it physical or spiritual in nature? Is it an emotion or a choice?

All too often contentment is confused with happiness and joy. However joy and happiness are emotions that well up within us, we feel them – when you are reunited with a close relative or friend after a long period of time. But like all emotions they waiver and fade, soon replaced by others.

Many spiritual traditions describe contentment as a state of being, one that is achieved by making peace with your situation and circumstances. To me this describes something deeper than emotions, which can be as changeable as the wind.

We are rarely in control of the circumstances of life and the ocean of our emotions can go from idyllically calm to sickeningly tumultuous in the blink of an eye. Yet if we exist at deeper level, beneath the waves, we can be content regardless of the raging storms above.

This in no way means we shouldn’t feel our emotions, for it is both natural and healthy to fully do so. What it does mean, is that we are not controlled and derailed by them. Instead we choose how to respond to them. Achieving this state of being is the work of a lifetime, and for it to be habitual, it must be practised in both the highs, and the lows of our journey.

A simple practice that can be used as a beginning is developing at an attitude of gratitude, by meditating on what you are thankful for. A focus on what is good enables us to resist becoming fixated on the things that are troubling us. Rather than avoiding them we are able put them into perspective in such a way that allows us to begin working through them on our own terms.

“Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honourable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.“

Philippians 4:8