Enjoy Your Life

Ego identity is maintained through our desires in the form of likes and dislikes. Constantly seeking to get what we want and avoid what we don’t want obscures the perfection of what is.
~Yogacharya Ellen Grace O'Brian

In the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, ancient Yogic scripture thought to have been written around the 2nd century BCE, we read in Chapter 1, Verse 15 that "dispassionate nonattachment enables one to consciously control urges, cravings and instinctual drives." (1) We naturally have things in our personal world that we like or dislike. These likes and dislikes come from our previous experiences and color our perceptions. Some can affect us positively and others negatively. Those likes and dislikes can cause suffering if we let them. We may crave things we like, become attached to having them and get upset when we can't have them. They may even become addictions. When we dislike something we may get angry when or upset when they occur. Fear of these things that we dislike may control our actions. These likes and dislikes may eventually define who we think we are. Our likes and dislikes can control how we live our life. When we let that happen we are forgetting that we are greater than these. When we observe our likes and dislikes objectively and unemotionally, we can then make the right choices, live in the way we desire to and enjoy life for what it is.
(1) Roy Eugene Davis, The Science of Self-Realization